Sermons available at For other resources or information about the seminary:
Transcript below:
Sam Horn: Well, I’m delighted today to have the privilege of having Dave Doran Jr. with me in the studio. Dave, you have had a phenomenal impact in my life personally over the years, and I’m delighted you’ve had the opportunity to come and do important messages on the gospel. I was blessed today as I heard you preach, and the message was incredibly relevant for my life. Out of that message I have a few questions I want to ask you.
Dave Doran Jr: Okay
Horn: So the first is—tell us a little bit about your ministry. I know you’re pastoring an inner-city church in Detroit that you planted. I’d love for you to speak a little bit about that.
Doran Jr: Yeah, so we went to Lincoln Park, Michigan in 2015; we were sent out by Inner City Baptist Church to plant Resurrection Church. And our task was fairly simple: to announce Christ and then pursue those who were responding to gather them into a body of believers and to begin to teach them to obey all that Christ had commanded. So my wife and I and a core team of a number of believers began to take up that process, and God’s been incredibly kind. So, in 2016, we formed membership as a church, and now here we are in 2019. We have a small group of believers that I think is making an impact for the name of the King. It’s been great.
Horn: And that pathway came through a time as a student pursuing theological education and serving on the staff of a church and now actually planting a church. And I love the name of the church: Resurrection Church. What a great joy.
Well, let me ask you, as you preached and as I listened and was impacted by the sermon, one of the things that I thought you did incredibly well was you defined terms. And you challenged us to define terms in our own thinking as we think about being gospel bearers. And one of the terms that you really spent time was “What does it mean to evangelize?” “What does it mean to be an evangelist?” So can you talk a little bit about that?
Doran Jr: Yeah. The term evangelism is really something that has almost turned into, in some churches, PR. And in other churches, it may mean events that that people can be invited to. There really is a lot of murky water about the topic of evangelism, and I think it’s very helpful for us to keep the definition of evangelism tight so that we know we can succeed in what Christ has commissioned us to do, which is to teach the gospel of Jesus Christ with the aim to persuade.
There’s a book by a man named Mac Stiles that really tries to drive that home—that this is proclaiming Jesus Christ with the aim that people would turn around and follow him. And when we have relationships—for instance, the term relational evangelism is a great term, but we need to make sure that the coffee is not evangelism. The proclaiming the gospel is evangelism. It’s a helpful distinction because sometimes we can in, for instance, relational evangelism—I love being relational. And you know the fight—you can be so patient that you never speak of Jesus. So if you can put that line out in front of you—No! I need to tell them about the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Horn: And I think that was very helpful, David, to me in my own thinking about my own evangelism, saying, “Okay, am I really using the relationship to get to the point of proclaiming the actual gospel with the intent of persuading?” I think that was very helpful to me today.
Speak a little bit to us about the gospel itself. How do we understand the gospel itself that we’re supposed to proclaim?
Doran Jr: That’s another term that is crucial to define clearly. In fact, there are a lot of discussions about “What is the gospel?” And the Scripture uses that term “gospel” and “good news” in several different ways. I mentioned one that it was the biblical, theological meta-narrative—that there is the good news of the kingdom of God that is a theme across Scripture. And then you have the theological life narrative of Jesus—the Gospel of Matthew. But at the core—you think of a passage like first Corinthians 15, where Paul says, “Of first importance”—this is the gospel, and it’s the death burial and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And what’s interesting is they function something like Russian dolls, where you cannot have the gospel—the good news of God reclaiming his creation—without the gospel of Jesus crucified, buried and risen again—the center of Christ replacing us on the cross and resurrecting as our victorious King; that he lived perfectly the way we couldn’t; died sacrificially in our place; rose victoriously on our behalf; and he is coming again.
What we try to always remind people in our church is that... (full transcript available at
0 Comments