Pastor Dave

David Jason VanAcker

Growing up, I went to church.  My parents made me.  Catechism at the Catholic church on Monday nights and then Sunday school and “big” church at the Lutheran Church each Sunday.  I remember being extremely bored by church.  Nevertheless, I thought of myself as a Christian throughout my early life.  I reasoned that I went to a Christian church, believed in God, and never killed anyone, so of course I was a Christian. 

My life – at least as it pertained to Jesus – remained pretty much the same throughout my adolescent and teenage years.  I went on in blind slavery all the way through Jr. High and High school.  I even went away to college unaware of my bondage to sin.

As an awkward freshman at a very secular (non-Christian) university, just about everything around me was trying to keep me in slavery.  However, one day, a friend of mine invited me to go to a Bible study with him.  I’m honestly not sure why I went initially, but I am sure that somewhere in the course of the next few Bible studies I was confronted with a question that God used to change my life and my eternity.  I was asked how I knew for sure that I would go to heaven when I died.  This shook me to my core.  I had always assumed that I would (go to heaven), but I had never thought about why.  Just like that, everything was different.

After several months of wrestling with God, He brought me to a state of brokenness.  I knew that there was nothing in me that deserved heaven.  I knew that my life had been based on a huge series of false assumptions.  I knew that everything had to change.  Through His Word and through His children God opened my eyes to see His beauty and my sinfulness.  I knew immediately that He was going to require all of me (that I would be spending the rest of my life telling others about Him).  And I knew immediately that He was more than worth it.

At Michigan State University, back in 1995, Jesus broke the bonds of slavery that had held me for so long.  He opened my eyes to see.  He released me from my sin and guilt and brought me into His kingdom—by grace, through faith in Jesus’ death on the cross and resurrection from the dead.  I didn’t deserve it.  I wasn’t even looking for it.  It was a gift from God.

I spent the next several years serving in, and being nurtured in my faith by, a campus ministry at MSU—learning to have quiet times, study the Word, share my faith, lead small groups, and oversee certain aspects of ministry. 

After graduation Gerri and I were married and began, what has now been, almost a full decade of full-time ministry together.  As the youth pastor at Sunnyside Church we were able to watch God work miracles in drawing dozens of non-Christian students and adults to Himself.  We were also able to watch God transform many of these new believers into mature disciple-makers.