The Day That Darrin Died: Sadness over Darrin Patrick’s Death

Last Friday I opened Twitter and saw the headline that pastor Darrin Patrick had died unexpectedly. Scrolling through my feed I saw pastor after pastor expressing surprise and sorrow. I felt the same. For several years, Darrin was my pastor. And although I haven’t been a member of his church for many years, in a lingering way, I still felt like he was one of my pastors.

Religious News reported that Darrin died from a self-inflicted gunshot. You can read the article to get more background on his ministry influence, his rough patch a few years ago, and his return to what appeared to be healthy, pastoral ministry in a local church. I’m not going to write about all of that here, mostly because I only know those parts of his story the same way many of you do, that is, from a distance. Also, others have chronicled those events in more prominent places, as in Ed Stetzer’s 2019 three-part series on Darrin’s restoration process (here, here, and here). I’d like to stay more personal because that’s all I know well, and also because one of Darrin’s gifts was brevity. A longwinded post from me wouldn’t honor that strength.

When my wife and I were first married, we moved to St. Louis. Darrin had planted The Journey only a few years before, and it was still relatively small in the summer of 2005. But the rapid growth had already begun or was about to begin in earnest. We followed The Journey’s church moves and expansion across four different campuses in just two years, from Ladue to Brentwood to Tower Grove to West County. Our next move was to leave Darrin’s church, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Shortly after we arrived at The Journey, I told Darrin I felt God calling me into pastoral ministry but struggled to work out the details of that call. He said we should grab breakfast. So, on a Saturday morning over plates of cheesy eggs and cubed potatoes at Stratton’s Café, Darrin encouraged me to try seminary at night for one year and then later go full-time during the day. So I did.

I never had breakfast with Darrin again. That hurt. But it wasn’t his fault or mine. There were a hundred, if not two hundred, young men just like me at The Journey preparing for ministry who wanted to learn from Darrin. He hadn’t done anything wrong. It was just math. The parishioner-to-pastor ratio got skewed, more meeting requests than minutes in a day. So we left his church, not because we didn’t love The Journey, but because I knew I needed to know a pastor and a pastor had to know me if I were going to be one someday. We found a small church near our house where I knew a pastor and learned to pastor.

Although I didn’t know Darrin well or for long, at significant moments in my life and ministry, I still wanted to give him updates. Sometimes I did. When I graduated from seminary and found my first job in pastoral ministry, I wrote him a long letter thanking him that some seventy-five months earlier he had encouraged me to pursue seminary; I finished strong and wanted Darrin to know I’d carried his council through. When Darrin spoke at the 2012 Desiring God conference, he saw me in the crowd, and we talked for several minutes before he spoke. When The Gospel Coalition published my first article, I sent the link to Darrin, which he seemed eager to read. Another time, I wrote a long, handwritten letter thanking him for specific lines from a sermon preached eight years before but remain words I’ll never forget. A few years ago, he sent me a Twitter message asking me to apply for an opening they had. I told him, Thanks but no.

In the best sense, Darrin was like a dad on a playground where lots of kids kept yelling, “Hey, look at me.” I was one of those kids. And I don’t think that was bad. Paul writes to the church in Corinth that “though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers” (1 Corinthians 4:15). Darrin was a spiritual father to many.

On Friday when I saw the news about Darrin’s death and received a few text messages, sadness ambushed me. Darrin had not been my pastor for nearly fifteen years, and yet, in another sense, through his writing and speaking ministry, he never really stopped being one of my pastors. Until Friday.

* Photo screengrab from YouTube, “Darrin Patrick - Lessons Learned in Losing My Church - Numbers 20:1-13” from May 27, 2019