Episode Three of Three

10:16English captions

The Call

The critic becomes a pastor. He is ordained in 2017, preaches through First Corinthians at Grace Presbyterian Church, teaches church history, and brings Worldview Wednesdays home to Sioux Falls. Everything comes back to reading the text aloud.

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Cold open

J. Mark BertrandHear the word of the Lord. And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

NarratorFor years, J. Mark Bertrand wrote about how the Bible ought to look on the page.

On Sunday mornings in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, he does what all those pages were made for. He reads it aloud.

J. Mark BertrandI don't know if it stood out to you, but it certainly did to me, as I was reading the passage aloud, how repetitious it is. There's one thing in particular that gets repeated over and over and over again, and it is the name of Jesus Christ.

NarratorThis is the story of how the critic became a pastor.

Act One: The Interruption

NarratorIn June 2010, after six quiet weeks, Bible Design Blog came back, with an apology.

For five weeks he had been filling in at his church. It was not something he had trained for. Awe inspiring, he called it.

One thing surprised him. In front of a congregation, he could hardly read. Not the Scripture. Reading a text aloud was no trouble. It was glancing down at his notes, and making it look as though he wasn't.

So he prepared the way a novelist would. He wrote each sermon out as if it were a chapter in a book.

And he owned up to one irony. The critic of red-letter Bibles set the Scripture in red, in his own notes.

Five years later, the interruption became the work. From August 2015, he was preaching at his church every Sunday.

By then he was a ruling elder, licensed to preach. Writing, he told his readers, was one reason he could not blog full time. The pulpit was the other.

The blog felt it. In 2008, he had published more than 160 posts. In 2017, he published seven.

On the 14th of February, 2017, he was ordained a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America.

J. Mark BertrandBrandon was ordained at the same time that I was. So he and I went through our ordination exams together. He went first, and then I went afterwards, and I felt that was a real advantage, because the guys examining really gave him all the hard questions, and then I got the easy stuff.

NarratorIn the pulpit, he preached from a Crossway Legacy, rebound in leather by Leonard's. And he made a confession.

The man who had campaigned to clear verse numbers off the page could not stop citing them. The habit dies hard, he wrote. I can't help myself. I do it all the time.

He was a long way from the South, too. He once tested a waterproof Bible against what he called the brutal, unforgiving winter of South Dakota.

J. Mark BertrandWhen we first moved here and I saw 80 miles an hour, I was thinking to myself, that's going to be difficult. I'm going to have to stop speeding.

It turns out that if you say 80 miles an hour and no more, I can find it within myself to get at least to 85.

Act Two: The Shepherd

NarratorGrace Presbyterian Church streams its Sunday services, all of them, from the call to worship to the benediction.

J. Mark BertrandGood morning, and welcome everyone to Grace Presbyterian Church. I'm Mark Bertrand, one of the pastors here at Grace.

NarratorIn July 2026, he began a new series.

J. Mark BertrandI have a friend who just finished preaching through First Corinthians, and it took him eighteen months to do it. So I said, challenge accepted, and we begin that journey this morning.

NarratorLine by line, Sunday by Sunday, through a letter to a troubled church.

J. Mark BertrandSo, the gospel is simple, but it's not stupid. The gospel is powerful, but it's not manipulative.

NarratorThe apostle's theme became his own. Nothing but Christ, and him crucified. And he did not exempt himself.

J. Mark BertrandI feel that as an ambassador, as a representative of the gospel, I don't want to be vulnerable in front of the world. I want to be impressive in front of the world.

What I'm saying is, if we're resting on Christ and him crucified, it's not only okay to be weak and vulnerable, it's necessary to be weak and vulnerable.

NarratorAnd the Bible man is never far away.

J. Mark BertrandYou might be reluctant to write in your Bible. I'm one of those people. I don't like to do that. But this you can scribble all over.

NarratorEach Sunday, the service comes to the Lord's Table.

J. Mark BertrandThis is not a spectacle. This is a supper. This isn't a table to look down your noses on from a distance, but this is a place of participation. All worship should be participation.

When we preach Christ and him crucified, if what Paul says is true, we preach everything. Everything.

NarratorOn Sunday mornings, he also teaches the history of the church.

This autumn, it is the medieval church. And a twelfth-century merchant named Peter Waldo.

J. Mark BertrandHe paid to have the New Testament translated into the vernacular language, into a French dialect. And then he began to study the Scriptures. And as he did that, he began to see the differences between what the Scriptures were saying and what the church was saying and doing. And that was a problem.

Interlude: a Sunday

Act Three: The Teacher

NarratorEvery summer, for more than twenty years, he has left home to teach at Worldview Academy, week-long camps for Christian students.

J. Mark BertrandWhen I teach at Worldview Academy, we control the lives of the students for the whole week. So we get to decide what the schedule's going to be, and one of the things we do is we make them every day focus on Scripture reading and prayer before they can even eat breakfast.

NarratorIn the autumn of 2025, he brought the lectures home. Most months now, in Sioux Falls, there is a Worldview Wednesday.

J. Mark BertrandThe thing that sparked my desire to do Worldview Wednesdays was realizing that there are a lot of people in the church who want to take their Christian faith seriously, and taking it seriously means thinking about every aspect of life from a Christian perspective.

Christianity isn't just a belief system, it's a faith that you practice, and that means that the ideas are going to have some sort of connection to the life that you live.

NarratorThe novelist is never far away, either.

J. Mark BertrandAs you probably know, in addition to being a pastor, I'm also a writer of crime novels. Gritty murder mysteries. All sorts of horrible things happen in these books, and it's truly delightful.

NarratorAnd every lecture comes back to the same place.

J. Mark BertrandThere's only one way, and it is to read the Scriptures.

Everybody wants a shortcut. Everybody wants the bullet points. Everybody wants to know what's the cheat code that allows me to have this knowledge without having to spend my life in the Scriptures. And the answer is, there's no such thing. There is no shortcut.

Finale

NarratorThe novelist hears the story. The typographer sees the page. The pastor stands up, and reads it aloud.

J. Mark BertrandAnd you can imagine, in that moment, hearing those words, that John must turn, expecting to see Aslan standing there, the Lion of Judah in triumph. But that's not what he sees.

Between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders, I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain.

The hero of God's story is the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ.

The Christian faith is the greatest, most beautiful thing that I've ever encountered in my life.

You can ignore chapter and verse, just read the paragraph text, and get lost in it.

Benediction

J. Mark BertrandAnd now I commend you to God, and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified. Amen.

Sources & credits

Footage courtesy of

Grace Presbyterian Church (PCA), Sioux Falls, Sunday livestreams, 2026
Worldview Wednesdays
evangelicalBible, “Mark Bertrand: The Schuyler Treveris”

Pictures

Photographs by J. Mark Bertrand, Bible Design Blog / Lectio
Living Water Community Church (PCA), Sioux Falls: postcard from the church’s website, about 2010