OUR SENIOR PASTOR

Dr. Josh Moody

Dr. Josh Moody

My passion is the gospel.  By that I don’t mean the cheap, cheesy, man-centered gospel that tells you that heaven can be won with a little prayer and playing nice. I mean the full orbed, bloody, biblical, God-centered, gospel that tells you that heaven is won through what Jesus has done. When I first started preaching some years ago someone came up to me after a service and said, roughly speaking, “I’ve worked out what’s different about this church. Other churches are telling me what I have to do. You’re telling me what Jesus has done.”  It’s my experience that when the God-centered gospel of Jesus Christ is caught – when it is believed and embraced and internalized and loved – then lives are changed as a result. I don’t want to talk about money, and duty, and how to construct outwardly pleasing lifestyles that “look” Christian.  I want to preach the gospel in the power of the Spirit so that we are no longer simply nice looking people but newly made people. 

A lot of this passion comes from my own personal experience. I grew up in an Anglican home where the Bible was taught and believed.  I made a profession of faith at the age of eight.  But I struggled with guilt and condemnation for many years. One evening, that I will never forget, I cried out over and over again to God for his mercy and forgiveness. Asking him ‘why haven’t you forgiven me?’ I was given assurance that he had. At that point my life changed. I did better at school. I became more confident. I soon preached my first sermon. My life didn’t change because someone told me I had to be good; my life changed because I finally realized through the work of the Spirit the truth of what I had been told all along: that I was accepted as I was because of what God had done in Christ. 

So that’s why I go through the Bible bit by bit, carefully, not because that’s some sort of tradition I have to hold onto. But because that’s where the gospel juice is: in the Bible. When we “let go of the commands of God” and hold “onto the traditions of man” that’s when we become legalistic. Humans are naturally legalistic, trying to find their self-worth and value in personal achievement and attainment, because we are naturally broken, and it’s easier to paper over the cracks with whitewash than to be made new. Easier, but not better; as we are changed from the inside out, so we become what we were always designed to be, and start on the life that is truly life.

Other things you might like to know about me: I’m married to a woman who is a godsend, keeps me sane, and with whom I do life and ministry together. We have three children.  We love them and each other.  I believe strongly in the community of the local church and love God’s people.  I’ve written a fair amount and some of it has got published.  I have a blog and I “tweet.”  I went to a preppy boarding school, gradually became intellectually overdeveloped through three degrees from Cambridge University (one of them everyone gets who has an undergraduate), and a fellowship from Yale University, but hey God still loves me. 

My scariest experience was on an all night train from Azerbaijan to Georgia trying to protect two single women from a crazed mafia man wielding a long knife. My happiest moment happens every time I see the lights go on in someone’s eyes about the gospel. My most embarrassing moment was singing a Rugby song at a Christian Union house party innocently thinking it was the one ‘clean’ Rugby song I knew, only to be told later by someone that it had a hidden, far from clean, meaning. I like books, sport, and any kind of music from Brahms to the Beatles to Coldplay to Dylan to U2 to Beethoven to Mahler.  “Go figure”.  I often tell people I’m not religious which always confuses them when they find out I’m a pastor, and I love that confusion. 

If you want any more secrets, you’ll have to ask my wife. And she’s not telling. 

I am a sinner saved by grace.