Pastor David Landry This is Me

 View all 23 references Web References

1. 1. Calvary Chapel Casa Grande

   www.calvarycg.org/min_men.php - [Cached]

   Published on: 4/2/2008   Last Visited: 4/2/2008

   Pastor David Landry - moi@calvarycg.org

2. 2. Preaching As A Social Act: Theology and Practice

   www.religion-online.org/showch - [Cached]

   Published on: 2/16/2007   Last Visited: 12/12/2007

   Consider a congregation called Faith Church with its pastor, David Landry, in an urban center called Metro City. A growing number of the members of Faith Church are becoming aware of a dimension of Landry's preaching that they do not find in most other churches. The people at Faith Church are beginning to see themselves as active, corporate partners in preaching with David Landry. They are discovering that preaching is essentially a complex interaction of several social realities.
   
   The Social Realities of Preaching at Faith Church
   
   For one thing, David Landry's sermons have become as much an act of the congregation as they are the expression of one individual. Each week five different small groups in the congregation meet to discuss the passage of Scripture for the sermon two Sundays hence and to explore how the Faith congregation walks the streets of that passage today. Most of the time the groups, whether a Tuesday noon business-person's lunch, or a Thursday morning prayer and Bible study group, or a Sunday evening discussion group, meet without David Landry. He is present, however, in the form of a page of exegetical notes or ten minutes' worth of exegetical insights on an audio cassette. Dozens of Faith Church members who do not participate in these groups also study the Scripture for the sermon ten days away. They read David's study notes in the weekly newsletter and then launch into their own exploration of the passage, leaving scribblings and suggestions in a special sermon box in the vestibule. David is never bound to use in his sermons any musings or insights of his members, but while his sermons definitely bear his own style and convictions, they nevertheless carry clear traces of a corporate voice of the congregation. These data from the life of the Faith congregation, rich in the people's symbols and values, assure Landry of sermon materials that consistently hit home with his hearers. In short, David Landry preaches as much for the congregation as to it.
   
   Nor do the social dimensions of preaching at Faith Church belong only to the people's participation in sermon formation. While David Landry speaks for the congregation, he also preaches to his people as a corporate body. Worshipers cannot listen to Landry's preaching long and remain an aggregate of individuals. The words "we" and "us" pop up frequently in his sermons. Landry regularly raises questions about what difference the scriptural text makes to the hearers as a community and constantly envisions how the congregation can react corporately to the implications of the Word in Scripture. Worshipers get the impression from Landry's rhetoric that he sees himself primarily as a member of the Faith community and secondarily as one set apart to preach to that body. He has the knack of joining his people in the pew at the same time that he addresses them, and of sharing with his folk in a corporate response to the sermon.
   ...
   Another kind of community regularly comes alive in David Landry's sermons; the body of believers that either foreshadows or gives rise to the sermon's scriptural text. Landry sees to it that his people in the sermon formation process always ask first what the struggle in faith meant, for instance, to those primitive Christians in Corinth or to the faithful in Solomon's temple. In his sermons, Landry invites his people to walk in the robes and sandals of the ancient community in order to be clearer about how to walk in the dress of a relevant body of believers today. Landry serves as catalyst for an interface of his people with the people who sat by the waters of Babylon and wept, or with the band of faithful who were shipwrecked, stoned, and imprisoned on behalf of the gospel.
   ...
   Until recently most members of Faith Church, as well as David Landry, brought a rather flat, single-dimensional orientation to preaching.
   ...
   David Landry sits in his upstairs study doing preliminary work on his sermon. He has just finished a second reading aloud of the Scripture pericope scheduled for the first Sunday in November. He leans back and stares out of the study window. A creative silence comes to his soul that belongs to the stillness that preceded the creation of heaven and earth. Landry listens prayerfully and intently to a quiet that almost rings in his ears, a hush of eternity from which will emerge pictures of possibilities from the pericope.
   ...
   David Landry will go to the shelves later for help from commentaries and other critical tools in order to grapple with the historical, political, and cultural realities behind the lines of the text, and to wrestle with the literary and structural issues between the lines of the passage. But for now he hangs in suspended animation spiritually, waiting for the wings of the Spirit to give flight to his imagination for the first breakthrough insight that will spark the beginnings of the sermon.
   ...
   David Landry can testify that his Tuesday noon downtown group or his Sunday evening sermon forum, while not robbing him of his calling to preach the gospel as he sees it, has nevertheless kept him out of many blind alleys in seeking to ride the trajectory of the text into today. When David Landry listens in early morning solitude in the privacy of his study for the dawning of meaning from a scriptural text, he knows he is even then listening in solidarity with his congregation. He knows Andrew Abrams, one of his elders, will have had an ear on that passage the same morning before opening his hardware store and will be responding with insight at the Tuesday noon gathering. Landry also knows that Betty Salinsky will join a circle Bible study at ten o'clock that morning that will seek in holy silence some vision with that same pericope.
   ...
   Landry will open the sermon box in the vestibule on Wednesday and will find among a dozen notes his weekly word on the text from Sid Shoemaker.
   ...
   Landry now knows in ways he could never have dreamed of several years ago that listening for God's Word in the first moments of sermon formation is the province not of pastor alone but of a cloud of witnesses joining their pastor.
   
   For David Landry such an experience of incorporated listening week in and week out has also cast a different light on the meaning of his ministerial leadership.
   ...
   The loop that begins with the interplay of text with preacher in Landry's early morning solitude moves to include the interaction of Landry with his people in order to give integrity to that first hearing.
   ...
   David Landry does not hesitate to speak directly to corporate social issues about abortion, drug abuse, ecological rape, or minority rights in Metro City and beyond because he understands social contextuality as the norm for the Word realizing itself.
   ...
   Several years ago, David Landry learned what a friend he has in the social sciences which help him mind the store at Faith Church. He learned from the social sciences how to "read" the environment of Faith Church, all the way from discovering the social networks and patterns in downtown Metro City to learning how such configurations connect with the wars, poverty, political oppression, and inflationary economies that mark the globe.(17)
   
   First, David's faithfulness to the social contextuality of the Word pushed him to reach for some handles for grasping the structure and flow of the neighborhood where he lives and ministers. A week after he moved into his parish he began taking a series of late afternoon walks to acquaint himself with the various social worlds in this inner district of the city. He got into the sights, sounds, and smells of this world.
   ...
   David Landry also began getting a feel for the delivery of basic services in the central sector. He visited both family practice health care centers in his district, found that AA met three blocks away at First United Methodist Church on Tuesdays, targeted where Big Macs and pizzas waited for his kids' eager grasp, noted the number of shops on Central Avenue that would be difficult for disabled persons to enter and found that there was no clinic for substance abuse and no shelter for the homeless for two miles in any direction. At one of the early meetings of his ruling board, David confirmed these impressions and enriched others from the board members' responses.
   
   Four months after his arrival, the newly formed Long-range Planning Committee at Faith Church, with David's insistence, derived much helpful demographic information about this district of Metro City from the Lake County Planning Board. As the Faith Church committee sought to develop a pathway into the future, it worked with census data on ethnic diversity, household changes, and patterns of age groups in the district. It studied levels of family income, employment patterns, types of housing units, population mobility, and poverty pockets in the area.

3. 3. NetAccountability

   www.netaccountability.com/ver2 - [Cached]

   Published on: 9/23/2004   Last Visited: 9/23/2004

   David Landry Pastor, Calvary Chapel of Casa Grande