About Me

(Updated 5/22/2022)

The most important thing you should know about me is that I am a Jesus-follower, a husband and a dad. Everything else is windowdressing. I learned about Jesus when I was a kid, growing up as a pastor’s son. As a teenager, I made a decision to accept his free gift of forgiveness and mercy, and to follow him as best I could. In 2002, I married the love of my life, Wendy, who has faced lifes ups and downs with me with love and loyalty. Wendy is my partner in ministry as well as in life. She and I work together in our church’s marriage ministry and care ministry. We are a team in every sense of the word. She is my person. Together, we’ve been blessed with two sweet daughters, Cheyenne and Summer. Cheyenne is, at the time of this writing, getting ready to start her senior year in high school, and Summer is getting ready to start 8th grade. They are both wonderful young ladies and I can’t wait to see what God does in and through them in the years ahead.

On to the windowdressing…

I guess I didn’t take the straightest path to where I am today. Out of high school, I attended a couple of years of Christian college and then dropped out. Wendy and I married shortly after, and I got the wild idea I wanted to be a car mechanic. There’s nothing wild about being a mechanic, of course… the idea was wild because I’d never worked on cars before. I learned to change the oil on my car months before moving my wife across the country so that I could attend the nation’s premiere automotive tech school. That’s me. I’m an all or nothing crazy kind of guy.

I spent several years in the automotive service world but eventually surrendered to ministry. The church Wendy and I attended at the time, Edmond’s First Baptist Church, was gracious enough to give me my first full-time ministry job. I worked there for almost four years under the leadership of Dr. Allan Day, who is now with the Lord.

After those early years working at EFBC, I was invited to join the staff of NewSpring Church in Wichita, KS. My dad had been the senior pastor there for over 20 years (at the time, it’s much longer now), and I had grown up at that church. Wendy and I decided to accept the call and move from Oklahoma back to Kansas. At the time of this writing, I’ve been blessed to serve here for 12+ years.

In the early days of my ministry at NewSpring, as associate pastor, I was assigned to do premarital and marital pastoral counseling. I quickly learned I was “in over my head.” That inspired me to go back to school to study psychology. Thanks to the convenience of online degree programs, I was able to complete my B.S. in general psychology with an emphasis in counseling from Liberty University. Later, I attended Regent University and received an M.S. in general psychology. Finally, I received a Ph.D. in industrial and organizational psychology from Grand Canyon University. As I said… from automotive tech school to dissertation… I didn’t exactly pick the normal path.

I now have the amazing privilege to serve as both the senior associate pastor at NewSpring Church, and also the program director of one of the graduate psychology programs at Regent University. In addition to my administrative role at Regent, I get to teach classes in research methods, the integration of psychology and Christianity, and advanced statistics (I love teaching these classes).

The bottom line here is that God has opened doors for me that I never could have opened for myself. He has given me a wonderful family, two wonderful jobs, and a very bright future. I am blessed far beyond what I deserve.