In Praise of My Youth Pastor

Three months ago, my youth pastor died after fighting brain cancer for 9 years. 

Jason (Jay) Hewitt was more than my personal youth pastor, of course. Outside of our relationship, he was a husband, a father, a youth pastor to hundreds (if not thousands) of students, the founding pastor of Friends Church Orange, an Ironman competitor, an author, and more. I can’t begin to give a good account of his life, because he did more in 44 years than most can hope for in twice that time. But for those of you interested in that breadth, and especially his heroic battle to run an Ironman while fighting cancer as a visual legacy for his little girl, you can read about it in his memoir, I Am Weak, I Am Strong, or watch the documentary about it, Dear Hero. Jay’s legacy of love to his wife, Natalie, and daughter, Hero, are a thousand times more beautiful than what I’m going to talk about here and I’d love you to know more of it.

In this piece, though, I simply want to pay tribute to him for the ways he personally blessed and gave shape to my life in ways that I am still reckoning. Over the years he was a mentor, a friend, and a brother. I've joked before that I am a Presbyterian because of Tim Keller. But I am a pastor because of Jay. 

I haven't been able to write anything about his passing or pay tribute to him publicly, partially just because my commitments in other fields, but mostly because I just couldn’t. I think I can now.

What follows is a loose narrative of my friendship with Jay and what I learned from him along the way. They are only a few of the ways that God used him to shape me and for which I am grateful. This is going to be necessarily autobiographical, unfortunately, but I suppose the point is that I can’t really tell the story of my own spiritual life and calling without talking about Jay.

The Coolest Guy I Knew

I can't remember the exact year that I met Jay. I do know that it was by my junior year in high school that I started to get to know him. Jay was an undergrad in Bible and theology at a local Christian college (Hope International) and one of several interns with our massive high school ministry (400+) at Friends church in Yorba Linda. We connected on a mission trip we took with our partner church in Utah. We were there to talk to Mormons, going door to door inviting them to an Easter Service. (Weirdly they were less receptive to our attempted door-front conversations than you’d expect.)

In any case, what I remember was sitting in our host’s basement talking theology and music. Jay loved all kinds of rock, punk, etc. but I remember having the distinct privilege of introducing him to Coheed and Cambria’s first album. It made me feel cool.

Because, here is the thing, Jay was undoubtedly the most naturally cool person I had ever known. He was tall. He was athletic. He played the guitar. He skateboarded and rode dirtbikes. He had backpacked across Europe. He was one of the funniest people you would ever meet in your life, with one of the quickest smiles and loudest laughs. All the guys wanted to be like Jay when we hit his age. And he was dating the coolest girl, who all the girls looked up to and wanted to grow up and be just like. Pretty much everything he tried, he got good at. Everybody liked him. What’s more, there was no way to be jealous of him because he was kind and thoughtful to you personally in the process. I mean, at the funeral they played video of him after the time he lost a front tooth in some accident (I can’t remember why), and even as he joked around at how goofy he looked, he was still cooler than you at being self-consciously goofy. (If it feels like I am making the guy up, there are several thousand witnesses who observed him up close over decades who can attest to Jay’s insane levels of natural coolness.)

More importantly for my story, though, he loved Jesus and the Bible and everything that went with it.  And everybody could tell that. Which is probably why they made him the youth pastor when everyone left.

Man in Charge

All this happened 20 years ago so my memory is a little fuzzy as to the details. But what I do recall is towards the end of my junior year or beginning of my senior year, the senior high school pastor, the associate high school pastor, and a couple of other interns all left for various legitimate reasons. Unfortunately, this left a 400-to-500-person youth group without a pastor. And in their sovereign wisdom, the elders at Friends church looked at this 22-year-old, freshly (or about to be) married, recent graduate from Bible college, and decided to give him the job. 

It made obvious sense to me at the time because I was 17 and didn't know anything, but at the age of 40 this is a crazy decision on paper.

Looking back, I suspect that it was more than just lazy pragmatism because time ended up proving those elders right. They must have seen what everybody eventually saw when it came to Jay. He was an extraordinarily mature young man, who carried himself at 22 better than most guys do at 30. He had wrestled through some real pain and challenges in his youth, which God, in his Providence, had used to shape him into a pastor so early. 

What I remember at that time, though, was seeing Jay step up. I didn't realize how formative it was for me, but I witnessed the weight of that entire ministry put on his shoulders—with all of the logistics, the preaching, the planning, the nagging/doubting parents, and the weight of several hundred souls—and I watched him bear up under it and succeed. Through prayer, humility, and probably a lot of behind the scenes doubts and stress that I was not privy to, he bore up and didn’t crack. And he became our pastor. 

As a note, I know prayer was a core part of this just because my senior year I ended up on our ministry's prayer team. (I could not sing, play an instrument, or do sound, so “prayer team” was it.) I remember we’d meet every other week for prayer and he would corral a group of goofy, hormonal 17 year olds into the serious work of praying for the souls of our peers. We were there to hang out and goof off, but Jay actually got us to pray. Why? Because he knew we needed it. He knew he needed it. It’s one of the ways I learned that I needed it. 

My First Sermon 

One of the key episodes in my story together, though, came a year later, during my freshmen year in college, when Jay let me preach my first sermon. 

Things were happening fast in my life. To condense a long story, the first half of freshman year was hard spiritually. I didn't start coming out of the woods until that winter as I attended a new church, started reading my Bible again, and at a special event was challenged to read my Bible and pray for an hour a day. I said, “yes.”

What followed was one of the greatest seasons of spiritual renewal in my life. I had never felt such intimacy, power, and joy in my relationship with God. Nor had I experienced such a desire to share with my friends and family about Jesus. I was already a pretty outwardly expressive Christian. I was always happy to argue about the faith or invite my friends to church or even give them Bibles. But this was something new.

In my enthusiasm, I decided to go back and tell Jay about the excitement that had come into my life through prayer. I also thought it would be a great idea to ask him if I could share for 5 minutes with his students on a Sunday morning about the power of prayer. 

To which he remarkably said, “Yeah, let’s do that in a couple of weeks.” 

I don't remember the exact timeline but as I recall it over the next week as I started to think about what I wanted to say, I texted Jay, “Hey, I actually have a little bit more to say could I make it 10 minutes.” 

To which he said, “Sure, go ahead.”

A couple of days later he got another text at which point he just said, “why don't we plan on having you preach the whole thing.”

This is another one of those instances where I think back and say, “if it were me I would have never let this happen.” But thank God it wasn't me. Thank God, it was Jay.

And so, that next Sunday, I got up in front of a few hundred students at Yorba Linda Friends and talked about the power of prayer in my life over the past few months as well as more importantly what the Scripture says about the power of prayer. I don't have the notes to that sermon because to my knowledge I was still crafting what I wanted to say and putting it in the correct order about 5 minutes before I got up there that Sunday. I have to reiterate: This was an insane amount of trust that Jay had shown me.

But for whatever reason, the Spirit of God was working that day in at least two ways. First, there was a visible response from several of the students who came up to thank me for that word who then went on to begin their own at least short stints with prayer. More importantly, another staff at Friends, walked up to me after and said, “Hey that was great. You’re studying to be a youth pastor, right?”  To which I replied, “No. I am going to be a…lawyer?”

Up until that moment, for several years, the plan had been firmly set in my mind to go study poli sci, become a lawyer, head into politics and see what God did from there. But in that moment after that sermon, I became aware of something that God had been doing in my heart for some time. That question, after that sermon, is the first in a chain of events that led to me consciously discerning a path into ministry.

There’s more to the story, as I intend to share, but without Jay taking a risk on a young college student that week, I don’t know what would have happened. 

Mentor

Funnily enough in all those months of conversations that followed with several mentors and friends, Jay wasn't initially the first person who was excited and convinced I should head into ministry. He loved me and trusted me, but I remember in that initial conversation I had where I started talking with him about becoming a pastor, he pushed hard and reminded me how much I liked arguing with people and how much patience you need with people in the ministry. That last quality wasn’t something I had at eighteen. 

And yet, over time, as this desire persisted and grew, Jay continued to give me chances and really took me under his wing.  

It happened in several stages. After a couple of years down the same path, volunteering in various ministries, serving with 6^th graders, and so on, Jay gave me the chance to be a house teacher. The high school ministry was so big that Wednesday night Bible studies were divvied up according to grade and school. And usually there was a local teacher who would present part of the lesson at each home before they broke up into small groups. At twenty-one, Jay gave me a shot at my first regular teaching gig. 

After that, when I finally enrolled in seminary, Jay brought me on as a teaching intern to help in the high school ministry. This was a remarkable opportunity of the sort I only realized was as special as it was afterward. 

Basically, my job was to help with the teaching of the high school ministry while I was in seminary. That consisted of two things. First, because my interest in academic theology was already starting to show, Jay let me create and teach a monthly Sunday school class through varieties of doctrines and texts such as: the Trinity, Hell, Parables, Revelation. Again, the risks were wild, the classes were small, but I learned a lot and had a blast. 

The other remarkable aspect of this internship was essentially learning how to preach with Jay. I've often joked that because I never got an M.Div. (only an M.A.), I never took a formal preaching class. Instead, I just listened to Tim Keller and Edmund Clowney’s classic lectures “Preaching Christ in a Postmodern World” probably three times through (this was back when you could download them off iTunesU). And that's true as far as it goes.

More importantly, Jay had me start meeting with him once a week to go over his sermons. 

Jay was one of the best communicators I've ever known. He had a way with words, images, stories, and the text that drove the truth into our hearts. But at the same time, he always wanted to improve. So he invited me in to start wrestling through texts together and work through a logical and theological order. What we would do is usually get together every Monday and try to hammer things out for an hour together. Jay would have already reflected on the text himself but then we'd get in his tiny little office in the corner, get out a whiteboard, and start to map the relationship between the various points he wanted to make from the text into a coherent whole. It was unlike anything I’d ever done before.

Things got really fun, though, when I actually convinced Jay to listen to the Keller lectures as well. He loved it. As I said, he was already a good preacher, but Tim's model of Christ-centered exposition really fired up his imagination. And so, we actually started to play around with the content and came up with our own shorthand structure to any sermon. It went something like this:

• Insight
• Problem
• Turn (Christ)
• New Identity

The idea is that any text is going to point you to some significant insight into the world, a problem connected to it, the way Christ’s life, death, and resurrection is an answer to it, and an ethic or a new identity that flows from your understanding the way the gospel answers the problem. So a sermon on friendship would talk to you about the nature of friendship, the way your sin stops you from being a friend, the way Christ was a friend to us in the cross, and the way that grace frees us up to be friends to others, or something like that. And it would be connecting the OT to the NT. 

Anyway, Tim's stuff was more complicated than that, but when we synthesized it into this little heuristic, it opened worlds for us. We realized you could switch the component pieces around based on whatever was more suitable to the text and you weren't just stuck with the one basic sermon structure, or one basic point, or one basic application. The text still governed that and we had to wrestle it out every week, but it gave you a way of logically and theologically organizing a through line that our students could follow and would always take them to Christ and into a new life.

Every week, then, for maybe two years in seminary, that’s what we did. We’d think through structure and try to word-smith it into a good one-liner for our high-schoolers to take home. I always sucked at that part. Jay was the master with the take home. And it was not just because he liked to play around with words. One thing that I got from Jay was his deep appreciation that he needed to not just draw out a logical connection before his students but he needed to present the truth to them in a way that could be remembered—in a way that reverberated in their souls like the songs they sung the rest of the week. Maybe it was the musician in him.

The really remarkable thing, though, was that I'd leave on Monday and I'd show up on Sunday at church and somehow, what Jay was preaching was what we had talked about,  but it was Jay's sermon structured, fleshed out, illustrated, and preached in a way that felt like it was hitting me between the eyes with the gospel every time.

There is one other component in all this that I can’t skip: I got to see Jay think and pray about students as part of his process of preaching. And in the middle of that I just got to be his friend. We wrestled with texts together, we wrestled with our students’ lives together, we wrestled with our own lives in light of these texts. I have had the privilege of studying with some of the finest theologians, biblical scholars, and pastors operating today. But I have never had something quite like those couple of years of Mondays with Jay.

So, while it's true that there is no report card for the grade from my class on homiletics, I can't actually say that I never took a class on preaching. Between Tim's theories and Jay’s weekly apprenticeship during these formative years, I think I had one of the best educations in preaching I could have. 

Sending Me Off

That was a beautiful thing because those were years of transition and anxiety. My early 20s were full of doubts, ambition, and the struggle to know if or how God would ever use me. I wasn't sure if I should go to more graduate or pastoral ministry, and if pastoral ministry, then where. I thought about these things constantly. I was also dating my future wife, McKenna, trying to think about what our life together would be like. And in the middle of this internship Jay just pastored me through all of that. True he was only a few years ahead of me, but again he felt so wise. And he was wise. And patient. 

I remember going out for a walk with him talking about my future and what it was going to look like and I can't even remember what provoked it but I remember him looking at me and saying to the effect of, “Dude, I'm not sure what you're going to do. I know God has something for you. But what I will say is I know God has blessed you with a good woman. McKenna is a great girl, she loves Jesus. And if you're married to her even if your job sucks for a while you're going to be OK.”

My job doesn’t suck, but he was right about McKenna. 

In any case, there was nobody else McKenna and I wanted to perform our wedding. And I'm so glad today that we still have those photos of Jay’s big fat grin standing behind me as I got to see McKenna walk down the aisle. 

But he didn't just send me off into marriage, he sent me off into my first job. A few months after I finished my masters and about four months into my engagement, I finally landed a gig working with college students and young adults at a Presbyterian church nearby. I was sad to be leaving but excited to go strike out on my own. As my going away present Jay actually went out and bought me my first Logos Bible Software. To a nerd like me just starting out, it felt like Jay had handed me the keys to the Library of Alexandria.

More importantly it was just one more way that Jay continued to invest in me and put his money where his mouth was when it came to telling me he believed in God's calling on my life.

Later Years 

We obviously stayed friends, but as our ministry paths started to shift, we got less time together over the years. He got to watch me start to figure out how to run my own ministry and I got to watch him answer the call to go plant a church in Orange. One of my only regrets about becoming presbyterian was that at it meant Jay and I were probably never going to be on staff again together. 

In any case, contact got sparser over the years as I moved away to grad school, he fought his long battle with cancer, and our families passed through different life stages and ministry contexts. But like so many who watched and cheered from afar I was amazed at Jay’s resilience and faith in God through the trial of those later years.

Even at the end, Jay never ceased to give testimony and to bless and shape me. By the grace of God and the kindness his wife, Natalie, I was able to visit him a couple of weeks before the end. The cancer had come up again and we knew this time it wasn't going away. After a couple of weeks of trying to coordinate schedules, I was able to make it in. By that time, Jay was feeling pretty weak and needed help to get up and move.

But even as we sat there talking, I could see, even in the middle of the pain, joy and light in his eyes. One of the funniest things was just him asking me what I thought of kids driving around on e-bikes. One had just driven by the window. Characteristically, I was kind of cranky about it because I'm always scared someone is gonna dart right out in front of me. Jay just looked at me with this twinkle in his eyes and said, “I love ‘em. I love seeing them drive by. I want to get one.” After all these years, all the pain, all the wisdom, growth, and saintly maturity, Jay was also still a kid on a bike doing wheelies. 

We said our goodbyes. I’ll leave all that more private, but in God’s mercy I got to say what I hoped he already knew about who he was to me. And that was the last time I saw him. I thought I had one more visit, perhaps, but I think Jay knew better. He knew Jesus was coming for him soon. 

I don't have a really good way to end this other than to say, youth pastors get a bad rap today. Some for good reason. But I've never been able to personally identify with it. Maybe that’s because God gave me the best one a kid could ever ask for. Jay loved his family. Jay loved us. Jay loved Jesus. 

And he finished well. Which is perhaps the last thing he showed me how to do.