Lauren di Matteo

Matthew Smith

Barabbas Road Church

Contact: 8253 Ronson Rd., San Diego 760-216-9081 www.barabbas.com

Membership: 500

Pastor: Matt Smith

Age: 43

Born: San Diego

Formation: University of California-Santa Barbara; Southern California Seminary, El Cajon.

Years Ordained: 15

San Diego Reader: How long do you spend preparing your sermon?

Pastor Matt Smith: My sermons are exegetical. Most people are looking for exegetical preaching. I spend 20-25 hours of sermon preparation, and the sermons are about an hour and 15 minutes long. We go book by book. The first 10 years, we’d gone through the entire New Testament, and now we’re alternating between Old Testament and New Testament. The next book we want to do is the Gospel of Luke.

SDR: What’s your main concern as a member of the clergy?

PS: We don’t live in a culture where there is such a thing as a non-believer. The cultural moment we’re in is not an apathetic culture anymore, but more and more it’s an antagonistic culture toward the gospels. We’re not in Athens; we’re in Babylon. So, Christians need to be a little more courageous to not be thought highly of. The Bible is a counter-culture and we truly are sojourners and aliens, and the church needs to accept that. In the past, our engagement with the culture has been to build walls, hide a bit, and blend in. But now we need to engage the culture by being in it but not of it. We also need to accept the consequences of people not liking us, and keeping our testimony in that moment, so that with gentleness and respect, we can speak the truth in the marketplace. We need as Christians to be trained from early on that we are missionaries in our own culture.

SDR: What is the mission of your church?

PS: The name Barabbas Road Church is great because as soon as you’re asked what it means, you have the share the gospel. Barabbas means “son of the father,” and as you see in scripture, he’s presented in the gospels as the man who is guilty of the exact crime of which Jesus is innocent; he’s mentioned at least six times in scripture. So, here’s this guilty son of the father, and he is let go as the innocent son of the father takes his place. It’s the perfect picture of substitution. He’s the first person to look at the cross and say, “That should be me.” So, it really gets immediately to the heart of the gospel. Our goal as a church is to make disciples through the personal investment of our lives with others. We tend to shun any programs. We don’t have any ministries at the church; we make ministers, not ministries. We emphasize that. And discipleship is the main thing we do at the church. We also never use the term “volunteer.” All the people at the church are ministers.

SDR: Where do you go when you die?

PS: Everyone meets God when they die. They are either going to enjoy God in heaven or they will face God’s wrath in hell. But everyone will face God when they die. They’ll go to heaven if they put their faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ, or to hell if they don’t. But let me just say, the people in hell wouldn’t want to be in heaven if they could. They don’t want to go because they wouldn’t want to worship God, which is what they do in heaven. But we live forever, one way or another.