The Gateway Church

The earliest believers were so united that no one claimed their possessions as their own, and there were no needy persons among them. Pastor Dominic Jackson takes up a subject Jesus addressed often but the church tends to avoid: our relationship with money and possessions. He considers whether this picture of radical sharing is a command for every age or simply a record of one moment. His suggesti...

Acts 2 closes with a portrait of the earliest church: a community marked by generosity, joy, and goodwill, to which the Lord added daily. Pastor Dominic Jackson asks whether this picture merely describes a distant moment in history or still shows God’s design for his church today. Tracing how the focus of Christian gatherings has shifted over the centuries, Dominic returns to the four things the f...

After the Spirit’s arrival at Pentecost, the crowd asks two questions: “What does this mean?” and “What shall we do?” Matt Crummy explores how Peter, the disciple who had denied Jesus only weeks before, answers both with one of the most consequential speeches in history. Drawing on the prophets and the Psalms, Peter reinterprets what his listeners already believed. He shows them that the crucified...

At Pentecost, the Spirit Jesus promised arrives with the sound of wind and the appearance of fire. Pastor Dominic Jackson explores what these signs would have meant to the first Jewish believers. Throughout Scripture, wind and fire marked God’s presence and the formation of a temple. Now they rest not on a mountain or a building but on ordinary people, making them the dwelling place of God. Domini...

Between the ascension of Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit, the early church faced its first major decision: who would take the place left empty by Judas? Pastor Dominic Jackson walks through this often-overlooked passage, noting the costly faithfulness of the first apostles and the remarkable diversity of the community Jesus gathered. He also shows how the believers met betrayal and loss ho...

Pastor Dominic Jackson opens the series on the book of Acts by looking at how Luke frames his second volume: not as a history of the apostles, but as the continuation of all that Jesus “began to do and to teach,” now carried forward by his Spirit-empowered followers. Dominic explores why the church needs both the teachings and the works of Jesus, why waiting on God is never wasted time, and how th...

In Luke 8, a woman who has spent twelve years unclean, unhealed, and unseen reaches through a crowd to touch the edge of Jesus’ cloak. Pastor Dominic Jackson revisits this familiar story with fresh attention to the religious and cultural world around it. He shows that the woman’s act was not desperation alone but faith. Her touch recognized Jesus as the promised Messiah who would come “with healin...

Closing out the summer series in the Psalms, Pastor Dominic Jackson turns to Psalm 130, a Song of Ascents sung by pilgrims on the way to Jerusalem. He explores what the Bible means by hope. Too often we treat hope as little more than a wish, which offers little strength when life becomes genuinely hard. Scripture offers a fuller picture: a hope rooted in God's faithfulness in the past, sustained b...

Matt Crummy explores Psalm 82, one of the more unusual and challenging passages in the Psalter, in which God stands in a heavenly assembly and judges other "gods" for their injustice. Drawing on the view that God created spiritual beings who share in his rule, Matt considers what this strange scene reveals about God's priorities. Defending the weak, the fatherless, and the oppressed is not a side...

Pastor Dominic Jackson turns to Psalm 90, the only psalm attributed to Moses, to explore its central prayer: "Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom." Moses holds life and death side by side. The God who formed the mountains is the same God who returns us to dust. Dominic shows why that is ultimately good news: our bodies are temporary, but the breath of God within us is n...

Most of what we associate with confession is negative: getting caught, being sentenced, carrying shame. Yet Psalm 32 opens by calling the forgiven person "blessed." Pastor Dominic Jackson follows David from the crushing weight of silence to the relief of being covered by God. Along the way he explores what the Bible's three words for sin reveal about us, and why healing comes not from a church wit...

In this guest sermon, Pastor Patrick Joslyn opens one of the most familiar passages in Scripture and asks whether it's actually possible to live a Psalm 23 life: without lack, without fear, and from a place of rest. Drawing on his own long seasons of loneliness, chronic illness, and a cancer diagnosis, Patrick imagines David writing this psalm while hiding in a cave from King Saul. He shows that t...

In part two of a two-week look at doubt, Pastor Dominic Jackson takes on one of the most loaded words in the church today: deconstruction. He names five common reasons people deconstruct, drawing on the painful story of his own friend group of future pastors and missionaries, most of whom have since walked away from the faith. Then Dominic opens Psalm 73, where Asaph nearly loses his footing watch...

Pastor Dominic Jackson opens Psalm 77, often called the "dark night of the soul" psalm, to explore what happens when we look for God the way we always have and can't find him. Drawing on the story of St. John of the Cross, who wrote Dark Night of the Soul after months of imprisonment and darkness, Dominic makes the case that seasons of spiritual dryness and doubt aren't signs of failure but are of...

In this sermon, Matt Crummy opens Psalm 46 by starting where the psalm starts: with God. Drawing on Rabbi Abraham Heschel's idea that faith is "the integration of the known with the unknown," Matt shows how the psalmists bring their fears of an uncertain future to the God they know. He traces the psalm through three movements: God's presence as our refuge and strength, God's formation of his peopl...

Pastor Dominic Jackson opens Psalm 100—a communal song of thanksgiving sung by God's people as they entered the temple together—to ask what happens when Sunday worship starts to feel like just another Sunday. Moving through the psalm line by line, Dominic explores the difference between happiness and joy, the myth of the self-made man, and the age-old debate over whether we were created to worship...

Pastor Dominic Jackson returns to the Psalms by way of Good Friday, asking one of the hardest questions in the gospel story: why did Jesus cry out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" After working through five common explanations for the cry of dereliction, Dominic opens Psalm 22 to show that Jesus wasn't voicing abandonment but quoting the first line of a psalm that foretells his crucifi...

In this guest sermon, Pastor Carlos Sims opens Psalm 126 to explore one of the most countercultural invitations in scripture: the path to joy runs directly through lament. Drawing from the Israelites' cry for restoration and the hope of the gospel, Carlos makes the case that bringing our tears honestly to God is not a detour from joy— it's the very seed of it.

The week the world got its first trillionaire, Psalm 49 has something to say. Written by the Sons of Korah—descendants of a man who had everything and reached for more—this ancient wisdom song cuts through the noise with a bluntness that feels almost rude: people, despite their wealth, do not endure. Matt Crummy traces the story behind the psalm and the subtle danger of ambition dressed up as piet...

What if the secret to happiness isn't what most of us are chasing? Opening a summer series in the Psalms, Dominic Jackson starts where the collection does—Psalm 1—and the question it puts on the table: what does it actually mean to be blessed? Along the way, the sermon moves from that question into a deeper one about formation: not just what we read, but what we chew on. What we consume shapes who...

Paul's instruction to build up one another turns out to be less about mentorship and more about the everyday texture of how we talk to each other—and whether we actually listen. Working through Ephesians 4:29–32, Dominic Jackson looks at what "unwholesome talk" actually costs: the person speaking, the person being spoken to, and God himself.

How do you confront someone you love without losing them? In this message, Pastor Dominic works through Galatians 6:1–2 and Matthew 18:15–20 to build a practical, honest guide to spiritual restoration—one that takes both courage and humility. Before you send that text or schedule that coffee, there are questions worth asking yourself first. And when you do have that conversation, Jesus gives us a...

When researchers asked a thousand people to describe Christians in three words, the top answer wasn't loving or faithful. It was judgmental. Working through Matthew 7:1–6, Dominic Jackson takes one of Jesus' most familiar — and most misused — teachings and asks what he actually meant. Why are we unqualified to judge? What is the fundamental attribution error doing to the way we see other people? A...

On his last night of freedom, Jesus didn't perform a miracle. He did a chore — the lowest, most menial one imaginable. Working through John 13 and Galatians 5:13–14, Dominic Jackson takes the foot-washing story and looks at it from angles that are easy to miss after twenty readings: that Jesus washed Judas' feet too, that the Greek word translated "example" literally means tracer or template, and...

The New Testament is full of instructions for how the church should treat itself — unity, love, humility. But in 1 Peter 4, written during one of the bloodiest periods in church history, Peter reaches for a word that isn't about the church at all. Not philadelphia — love of brothers and sisters — but philoxenos: love of the stranger. Working through 1 Peter 4:7–11, Dominic Jackson traces what hosp...