Putting together a message for Delaware Grace Church is serious business for Nottingham.
While putting together a sermon, Wes Nottingham (WC ’13) often returns to a chapel led by former Worthington Christian High School teacher Tom Burns.
The associate pastor at Delaware Grace Church recalls his classmates singing at the start of a chapel when Burns came running towards the stage, waving his hands, and asking the worship band to stop playing.
“Everyone was looking around and wondering, ‘What is happening? Is someone in trouble?” Nottingham said with a chuckle. “And this crazy, awkward silence just falls over the Chapel. He gets up on the stage, and he seems like he’s angry. He tells everyone to sit down and dismisses the worship band from the stage.
“He then proceeds to teach on true worship. His message was that worship is serious. If we do it flippantly, we’re not actually doing it at all. In hindsight, I realized he planned to do that to make a point, but that Chapel message is burned into my mind.”
Recently, Nottingham regaled his congregation with that story on Burns to illustrate a sermon on worship.
“Part of the point I wanted to make is if we only worship with our lips, we’re not worshipping,” he said. “We need to worship with our hearts, in our souls. We do that by being serious.”
A typical sermon might be 30-40 minutes long, but according to Nottingham, the message churchgoers hear on Sunday is just the tip of a very large iceberg. He estimates he spends 15 to 20 hours of his week researching the text and crafting his message.
“I spend a lot of the week diving deep into preparation and study to make sure I am personally grappling with the text before I share it with anyone,” he said.
Nottingham, who earned a bachelor’s degree in theology and apologetics in 2017 and a Master of Divinity in Biblical Studies in 2021 from Liberty University, remembers that jittery feeling in his stomach right before he gave his first sermon in a church setting eight years ago.
Several sermons later, that anxiety still lingers as he approaches the pulpit.
“The first time I preached, I didn’t want to look like a fool. I didn’t want to stumble through my words. I didn’t want to slip up,” he said. “Even now, there’s that hint of nervousness every time I get up to preach. But after the first five minutes or so, that all dissipates. I am getting to do what I love, so that nervousness often fades away quickly as I get into it.
“Delivering the sermon is not the only thing a pastor does, but it is one of the most important things. Sermons … are one of the primary and most crucial ways to shepherd, lead, and cast a vision for the congregation.”
Sermons are part of the pastor’s role of creating a well-constructed vision and mission for the church. Nottingham believes words like “vision” and “mission” are words churchgoers often hear but are unsure what they mean.
“The illustration I give is imagine you’re taking a road trip across the country and you want to get to California,” he said. “That’s your ultimate goal, which you want to accomplish at the end of your journey. That is your mission.
“Visions, on the other hand, are the stops along the way. To reach California, you must drive through the Midwest, cross the mountains of Colorado, and get to Utah before you reach California.”
According to Nottingham, Delaware Grace’s mission is “growing together to live like Jesus.” To reach that goal, the church is looking for ways to reach the county’s quickly expanding neighborhoods. According to USAFacts.org, the population in Delaware ballooned by 29.2 percent between 2010 and 2022, expanding from 175,114 people in 2010 to 226,296 in 2022.
Like Delaware County, Nottingham and his wife, Olivia, have experienced their own population explosion over the last four years, adding three children: Sage (3), Foster (2), and Carson (15 months).
“Olivia and I had been married for three years before we had our first child,” Nottingham said. “But that feels so long ago. Now we can’t imagine life without kids. They’re a lot of work and take a lot of time, but it’s such a joy to … see them grow and develop and their personalities come out.
“One of my greatest joys has been seeing spiritual things click with those three. It’s been a lot of fun seeing them learn what prayer is. They have such a rudimentary knowledge of it, but asking Sage and Foster to pray at dinner is so fun. What Foster does is list a bunch of things. He’ll go down and list all our family members and then say Amen.”
Nottingham’s growing family has helped the associate pastor realize the importance of instilling prayer and solid Biblical values in their children.
“Those spiritual things you’ve always said are important … have been raised to a degree I’ve never really experienced before,” he said. “You don’t really recognize those things’ importance until you have kids.
“I have felt the Lord changing my heart and my spirit. When you have this baby in your arms, you think, ‘Wow, this is a life the Lord has given me. This child is not mine. I am only an ambassador for God, and He’s given me the care of his child.’ Feeling that weight is huge, but I’ve really enjoyed every piece of that.”
Part of Nottingham’s individual mission has become passing on the importance of those values to its congregation. He makes sure his sermons always include the message of the gospel.
“I think a lot about the book of Job,” he said. “When the Lord comes down and speaks to Job and his friends, one of the things that has always stuck out to me is the Lord looks at Job and then he looks at Job’s friends and he says, ‘Job, your friends have not spoken what is true of Me.’
“That’s always in the back of my mind when I preach. I don’t want the Lord to say of my preaching, ‘Wesley, you have not spoken what is true of Me.’ I still feel the nervousness I felt the first time I preached because I feel the weight of truly preaching His word.”