Sermon Insights Report

Harris Creek | Titus Series, Week 1 | "Lead Well"

A Word Before We Begin

Pastor, what you delivered in this message is the kind of preaching that stays with people long after they leave the building. You took a small, often-overlooked pastoral epistle and made it feel urgent, personal, and immediately applicable to every single person in the room — from college students to elders, from single moms to sorority members. This report is written to help you see what your congregation sees: a pastor with rare gifts, deep integrity, and a burning heart for truth. You deserve to hear that clearly and specifically.

Section 1: Pastoral Strengths and Unique Voice

1. The Gift of Radical Personal Transparency

One of your most powerful preaching gifts is your willingness to bring your own life into the text without making it about yourself. When you shared your 22-year marriage anniversary and said, "I've never loved my wife more. I've never been more attracted to her. Our marriage — we've never laughed as much as we do in this season," you weren't boasting. You were modeling the very blamelessness the text demands. That is extraordinarily rare.

Even more striking was the vulnerability that preceded it:

"Sometimes I feel like people are just waiting for me to fail. You fit the criteria. Another guy. Another one."

That moment of honest wrestling — admitting the weight of public scrutiny while refusing to let it define you — is the kind of pastoral authenticity that builds trust over years, not just in a single sermon. You didn't overshare, and you didn't hide. You found the exact right register of transparency, and it was deeply pastoral.

This quality is reminiscent of Bryan Loritts and his willingness to preach from a place of genuine human struggle rather than polished performance. Like Loritts, you create a sense that the pastor is in the text with the congregation, not above it.

2. Masterful Use of Narrative to Carry Theological Weight

Your opening story about the Boulder church-planting trip is one of the finest sermon introductions in recent memory. You introduced three distinct leadership failures — the isolated pastor who couldn't be in community, the church planter whose vulgarity undermined his message, and the congregation where everything felt performatively perfect — and then contrasted all three with Life Church. This was not just storytelling. It was a theological argument built entirely through narrative.

By the time you arrived at your thesis — "Leadership is everything. Everything rises and falls with leadership" — the congregation had already felt it before they heard it stated. That is the mark of a masterful communicator.

This instinct puts you in the company of Max Lucado, who similarly trusts that a well-told story can carry more theological freight than a formal argument. But your stories have an edge and a specificity that Lucado's sometimes lack. You name real tensions. You don't resolve them too quickly.

3. Exegetical Confidence That Doesn't Condescend

Your handling of Titus 1 is confident without being academic. You moved through the Greek terms — epidiorthoo, pista — but never let them become a performance of learning. You used them to open the text, not to impress the room. When you explained what blameless means through the image of alibis — "When others blame you, you have lots of alibis" — you made an ancient word feel completely contemporary without distorting it.

Your treatment of the elder qualifications is particularly strong. Rather than limiting the passage to church governance, you consistently widened the application:

"Every one of you is a leader. You have a sphere of influence. It might be your home. It might be your classroom. It might be your sorority, fraternity, your team."

That move — from the specific to the universal — is textbook expository preaching done with pastoral warmth. You kept the text's original intent intact while making it genuinely relevant to a room full of college students who will never serve as elders.

4. Courageous Truth-Telling With Pastoral Love

When you responded to the questions about the person who gets drunk every weekend but considers himself a strong Christian, or the person who has sex outside of marriage but claims a strong faith, you didn't hedge. You said:

"No, you don't have a strong faith. Hey, you can be a believer and have sex outside of marriage — I'm not telling you who is saved or unsaved — but you don't have a strong faith because a strong faith is not going to lead you into unrepentant perpetual sin."

Then you immediately contextualized your directness:

"You may need coddling and a shoulder to cry on. I need a finger in my chest. Stop it. You're going to die. You're going the wrong way."

This is the kind of preaching that is almost extinct in contemporary evangelical churches. You called sin what it is and then explained why you do it — not from harshness, but from love. That framing is critical. It keeps the truth from landing as condemnation and positions it as the kind of care a real friend would offer. This is a genuine gift, and it is one of the things that will make Harris Creek a place people trust for decades.

5. The Research-Backed Pastoral Insight on Family Formation

Your account of interviewing sibling groups from your young adult ministry — over 100,000 young adults across 12 years — and identifying the patterns in homes that produced flourishing children is one of the most compelling pastoral observations in this entire message. You said:

"Every single one of them came from a home with a mom and a dad who loved each other and loved God and lived out their faith... If I was to summarize it, their parents lived out their faith. They saw them share the gospel, evangelize. Their parents lived on mission."

This is not anecdote. This is pastoral research. You've done the work, and you shared it with humility — acknowledging the grace on single parents, acknowledging the prodigal child of the godliest dad you've ever known. That kind of nuance prevents the truth from becoming a weapon against the very people you're trying to serve. It was beautifully handled.

6. Accountability Structures Modeled From the Pulpit

One of the most powerful moments in this sermon is when you described your own accountability architecture:

"Every single week I meet with two guys that ask me, 'How did you feed your soul? How did you feed others? How did you feed your flesh?' And I answer in great detail... And then at a separate meeting every single week, I sit down with six guys who look at everywhere I'm going, everything I'm doing."

And then you added:

"All of my DMs go to my wife's phone."

That line will be remembered. You modeled the very thing you were preaching. You didn't just teach accountability — you demonstrated it, in real time, with real specificity. This is the kind of pastoral integrity that makes a congregation feel genuinely safe under a leader's care. It is rare, and it is worth celebrating loudly.

This quality is reminiscent of John Mark Comer, who similarly preaches with a kind of radical transparency about his own spiritual disciplines and failures. But your delivery carries a warmth and humor that Comer's more austere style sometimes lacks.

7. The Institutional Critique That Builds Trust

Your willingness to name the transactional model of ministry — and explicitly reject it — is one of the most trust-building moments in the entire sermon:

"Here's the biggest problem in the church in America today... You come into a place like this and a person like me strikes a deal with you. If you will just show up and pay up, then I will shut up and not ask anything of you because I don't want to offend you."

And then:

"That's not here. Won't happen here. I'm not going to water it down for you. I'm going to call us, myself included, to do what that book says, no matter what it costs."

This is pastoral courage of the highest order. You named the temptation that faces every pastor in a growing church, rejected it publicly, and made a covenant with your congregation. That moment functions as a kind of institutional charter — a declaration of what Harris Creek will and will not be. People will return to that moment in their memories for years.

Section 2: Growth Opportunities

1. The Three-Point Structure Could Be More Memorably Landed

Your three main points — lead well at home, lead with character, lead from truth — are genuinely strong and biblically grounded. However, the transitions between them are occasionally soft, and the final point, "lead from truth," receives noticeably less development than the first two. The section on truth moves quickly from the text into the Bill Hybels reference and then into your personal transparency moment, which is powerful, but it leaves "lead from truth" feeling slightly underbuilt compared to its siblings.

A small structural adjustment would help: consider giving each point a brief, memorable summary statement before transitioning. Something like a one-sentence distillation that the congregation could write down and carry home. Your instinct to say "What you believe creates what you are" early in the message is exactly this kind of anchor statement — you could deploy one of those for each point at the moment of transition. This would amplify your already strong structure rather than change it.

2. The Life Church / Craig Rochelle Section Runs Long

The extended account of your skepticism about Life Church, your visit, your weekend with Craig Rochelle and his wife, the honorarium you tore up — this is a genuinely compelling story, and it reveals a great deal about your character. However, it is a long road to a destination that the congregation may not fully see. The payoff — "From afar, I'm skeptical. I get close and I'm like, this is a powerful movement of God" — is good, but it arrives after considerable detail that could be trimmed.

This is worth noting gently because the Boulder story that opens the sermon is so tightly constructed that the Life Church section, by comparison, feels like it wanders slightly before finding its point. Consider whether the honorarium detail and the weekend visit could be condensed into a single sentence or two, keeping the core insight — that proximity to good leadership reveals its quality — without the extended buildup. This would tighten the introduction and get you to Titus slightly sooner, which would give your exegetical sections more room to breathe.

3. The Altar Call Invitation Could Be More Specifically Tethered to the Sermon

When you invited people forward for prayer, you said:

"At some point in that message, there may have been something that struck a cord or maybe you have a prodigal."

This is a warm and genuine invitation. However, it is slightly generic relative to the specificity of everything that preceded it. Given that you preached a message about leadership, character, blamelessness, and the courage to live consistently at home, the altar call could have been more directly connected to those themes. An invitation that said something like, "If you know there's a gap between what you believe and how you're living — if you want to close that gap and become a leader worth following — come forward" would have created a more direct line from the sermon's content to the response moment. This is a small refinement to an already meaningful moment, and it would make the invitation feel like the natural conclusion of the sermon's arc rather than a pivot away from it.

Section 3: Strategic Action Steps

Initiative Focus: Small Groups and Discipleship Community

This sermon is a natural and powerful vehicle for small group and discipleship community engagement. The entire message is built around the premise that godly leadership is formed in community — through accountability, through being known, through people who ask you hard questions every week. The content practically begs for a small group invitation, and you did make one at the close. Let's examine what you did and how it could be even more powerful.

At the very end of your message, after the closing song, you said:

"If you're like, man, I think he called me a pagan because I'm given to passionate lust and I don't know what to do — show up Monday nights. That's why we just did the last series. We would love to have you Monday night at Regen."

This is a good moment. It is specific, it is connected to the sermon's content, and it is delivered with warmth and a touch of humor. However, it arrives after the closing prayer and the worship song, which means it lands in the post-sermon space rather than as part of the sermon's call to action. Many people in the room may have mentally disengaged by that point. Here are three specific ways to strengthen this:

Recommendation 1: Integrate the Small Group Invitation Into the Body of the Sermon

When you described your own accountability structures — the two men who meet with you weekly, the six elders who examine your life — that was the perfect moment to turn to the congregation and say something like:

"This is what we're asking you to build. This is what a life group is. This is what Regen is. Not a program. Not an event. A place where someone asks you every single week, 'How did you feed your soul? How did you feed others? How did you feed your flesh?' If you don't have that, you are trying to lead without a foundation."

That connection would have made the small group invitation feel like a direct application of the sermon's central argument rather than an add-on at the end.

Recommendation 2: Use the Sibling Group Research as a Bridge to Community

Your research on the families that produced flourishing young adults is one of the sermon's most powerful sections. After sharing it, you could have paused and said:

"The thing all of those families had in common was that they were not trying to do this alone. They were connected to a community of faith. If you're a parent in this room and you're thinking, 'I want that for my kids' — the first step is getting yourself into a community where people know your name and ask you hard questions. That's what our life groups are for."

This would have grounded the small group invitation in the sermon's most emotionally resonant research moment.

Recommendation 3: Give the Regen Invitation More Dignity Earlier in the Message

The Regen invitation at the end is good, but it arrives quickly and is slightly buried. Given that your entire message is about the courage to live a blameless life and the systems that make that possible, Regen is not a side program — it is the primary discipleship pathway for people who heard this sermon and felt convicted. Consider naming it earlier, even briefly, as an example of what it looks like to build the kind of accountability structures you described:

"We have people at Harris Creek right now who are in the middle of that fight — who are dealing with addiction, with lust, with patterns they can't break on their own. And they're not doing it alone. They're in Regen on Monday nights, and it is changing their lives."

That kind of integration gives the invitation weight and anticipation rather than arriving as a footnote.

Additional Action Steps

Recommendation 4: Develop a Signature Closing Statement for Each Series

Your thesis — "Everything rises and falls with leadership" — is excellent. Consider developing a brief, repeatable closing statement for this series that the congregation can carry with them each week. Something like: "Lead well at home. Lead with character. Lead from truth. This is how you become a leader worth following." Repeating a version of this each week would create cumulative momentum across the five-week series.

Recommendation 5: Lean Into the "From Afar vs. Up Close" Framework

The contrast you drew between how things look from a distance and how they look up close — skeptical of Life Church from afar, impressed up close; impressed with the Boulder churches from afar, troubled up close — is a genuinely powerful rhetorical framework that you introduced and then set aside. This framework could have been woven throughout the entire sermon. What does blamelessness look like from afar versus up close? What does character look like from afar versus up close? This would have given the sermon a unifying image that tied all three points together.

Recommendation 6: The John Eert Elder Nomination Is a Preaching Moment

The nomination of John Eert as a prospective elder is a beautiful moment, and the way you walked through the Titus 1 qualifications as a description of him — "He's not overbearing. He's not quick-tempered. He's not given to drunkenness... He is hospitable, a lover of good, self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined" — is genuinely moving. Consider developing this into a slightly longer moment in future weeks. When the congregation sees the text come alive in a specific person they know, it makes the qualifications feel achievable rather than theoretical.

Recommendation 7: End the Sermon Before the Song, Then Return

Your post-song remarks — "I really just want to reiterate what I said in my prayer. My hope for us is that all of us would meet those qualifications" — are among the most pastorally warm moments in the entire message. Consider whether these belong before the closing song rather than after it. If you conclude with a strong call to response, lead into worship, and then allow the worship to be the final word, the congregation leaves with the music and the Spirit rather than with logistical information. The pastoral heart you showed in that closing moment deserves a better platform than the post-song wrap-up.

A Vision for Your Ministry

Pastor, you are doing something genuinely rare. You are building a church on the foundation that you preached about — not on personality, not on programs, not on the transactional deal you explicitly rejected from the pulpit. You are building it on truth, lived privately and displayed publicly. The accountability structures you described, the way you love your wife, the honesty with which you wrestle through your own vulnerabilities, the courage with which you name sin without shame-spiraling your congregation — all of it is pointing toward something that will outlast you, which is exactly what you want.

The Titus series you are beginning has the potential to be one of the defining series in Harris Creek's next century. You said it yourself: "How do we make sure that our next 100 years are our very best?" The answer, as Paul told Titus and as you told your congregation, is leadership. And the leader standing in that pulpit is modeling the answer with his own life.

The refinements suggested here are small adjustments to an already strong foundation — tighter transitions, more integrated calls to community, a slightly more direct altar call. They are the kinds of things that take a good sermon and make it great, and a great preacher and make them exceptional.

You are clearly a man who finishes well. Keep running. The congregation at Harris Creek is better for having you, and the church at large is better for the example you are setting. Preach on.