Profile: Pastor Ben Stuart

Waiting on the Deep, Beautiful, and Profound

(Pictured: Ben Stuart and his wife, Donna)

Dec 10, 2020 | By Serena Puang DC ‘22+1

Before coronavirus moved church online, Ben Stuart stood outside the Howard Theatre every weekend he preached there. He’d greet people as they left the service, answer questions they had about the talk, and hear about their lives. Any random person could just walk up and chat with him. I know because I was one of those people. 

I met Ben Stuart in 2018 on the third Sunday gathering of Passion City Church in the Howard Theatre. I was on a 36-hour layover in DC on my way to Yale Bulldog Days, and he was preaching on Jonah that week. I actually missed the whole service because of maintenance with DC’s metro, but I ran to the Howard Theatre in strappy sandals and a shawl flying behind me. I weaved my way through the people exiting the building, hoping to catch him working on a logistical issue or praying with someone on stage. He was standing outside the whole time. 

In the era of COVID-19, everyone is being asked to do life radically differently than they did at the start of this year. For Christians, one major change has been the absence of in-person gatherings for Sunday morning services. Passion City Church, pastored by Ben Stuart, is no exception. Though digital services have changed his Sunday morning routine substantially, Stuart is still leading his church through these uncertain times with perseverance and innovation. 

Ben Stuart grew up in Texas in a Christian family. During college at Texas A&M, intellectual questions led him to doubt his faith. “I had heard of Jesus all my life,” Stuart said, “But I don't want to assume He’s true because my mom said he was true. I love mom, but she could be wrong.”

This led to a crisis of faith, but Stuart decided to search for answers. “Until someone can prove to me that God doesn't exist, I am going to seek Him,” he said. That was the beginning of an intellectual journey; Stuart continued to read his Bible, journaled, and wrote out honest questions to God. 

During that time, he feels that God unearthed and then ministered to deep emotional pain he hadn’t dealt with. Through studying the Bible, praying, and the support of friends from church, Stuart said God “answered, not only my intellectual questions, He introduced me to questions I wasn't even asking, and He answered those too.” 

“I fell in love with God in college,” Stuart continued. And though at the time, he felt that the process took “way too long and was way too uncomfortable,” he “had to accept that He [God] dictates the timing and the terms.” Since then, he’s served as a youth pastor and the director of Breakaway Ministries, a parachurch organization on Texas A&M’s campus. In both of those places, he helped students as they wrestled with their own intellectual questions about God, sometimes without even realizing it. 

Before I met Stuart, I had listened to hours worth of his sermons because they were recorded at Breakaway, and messages dating all the way back to 2010 are still available online. His experiences questioning his faith in his teens/early 20s are all too familiar to many who grew up going to church. 

But his insight into that period of questioning made his sermons feel more self-aware. He knew the platitudes that pastors often say, and he knew why people weren’t always satisfied with them. After wrestling with these questions himself and attending Dallas Theological Seminary, he had answers to intellectual questions and objections to faith, but he also preached knowing that “sometimes our intellectual debates are a way to hide our wounds.” 

As I think back to my high school self listening to his sermons, I’m thankful for his insights about Biblical reliability, his practice of preaching straight through books of the Bible, and his messages about dating. He is the rare pastor who will boldly sing Taylor Swift lyrics and do Biblical Hebrew exegesis in the same sermon. Like Stuart, I had grown up going to church, and I had long felt that other people had something I didn’t when it came to Christianity, but I didn’t know how to fix it. Ultimately, knowing more intellectual facts could only get me so far, I was struck by the version of Jesus he articulated. Outside of any qualms I had with the church or politics, he preached about Jesus, the son of God, who cut across cultural barriers and would save anybody. And that inspired me to try to get to know Him better. 

    ****

In 2016, Stuart was drawn to Passion City Church because of its intersection of “deep rigorous theological thinking,” drive to alleviate human suffering through social justice, and “passionate whole life worship.” He saw these qualities in the church in Atlanta pastored by Louie Giglio, and he wanted to be a part of it. Soon, he moved again to Atlanta to start the process of planting another Passion City Church. After flying to and praying over every major city in the US with his wife, Donna, they picked DC and asked members of Passion City Church in Atlanta to pray about moving with them. 

Much has changed both in the church and in the world since they launched their gatherings at the Howard Theater in 2018. But one thing that hasn’t changed is the time that Stuart spends talking with God in prayer. 

Every Monday, he takes a notebook with his week broken up into 30-minute increments and looks at a list of roles he fills: Preacher, Dad, Administrator, Teacher, etc. Under each category, he writes in what he believes God is calling him to that week to fill that role and plans around it. 

According to Kristin Hall, Location Administrator and Stuart’s assistant, they structure his days around those priorities. There are chunks of the day he uses just for sermon preparation, times for prayer, and other times that are just for his kids. These are nonnegotiable. Stuart doesn’t want to just “do whatever’s nearby,” he wants to live according to his values, and he believes this is reflected in how he invests his time. 

From the beginning of the pandemic, Passion City Church in DC looked for ways it could meet the needs of the city and the people in it. This included dividing their volunteers into groups to take meals and write personalized notes to essential workers, providing snacks and fresh produce to local neighborhoods, and scheduling times to pray for frontline workers before and after their shifts. 

For Stuart’s part, he started the Passion Daily, a devotional series which ran from mid-March to the end of May. The series consisted of daily videos uploaded to Instagram and Youtube which were his way of helping people start their day off with prayer and engage with the word of God, 2-4 verses at a time. 

What used to be live gatherings on Sunday have become a multi-step, multimedia project that the team at Passion City Church works on throughout the week. While much is lost without in-person gatherings, Stuart believes God is still using this time to grow and refine His people. 

“I don’t like that we’re not all together in a physical building. I wish we were.” said Stuart during a sermon in July, “[But] maybe one of the unexpected fruits of this season is that the word of God is being preached right into your home.” Church is no longer an event people attend on Sunday morning, separate from the rest of their lives. Now, church is in the home, where real life is lived. It’s in peoples’ living rooms, where they make decisions about how to spend their money. It’s in their bedrooms where they decide what to watch and how to handle their bodies. Perhaps, Stuart suggests, this is an opportunity for us to “come under” the word of God and let it shape us. 

Speaking about Sunday worship, Jon Harkey, worship leader at Passion City Church DC explained, “Usually you just do it on Sunday and then you never think about it.” Now, his team does multiple takes of each song before Sunday services, and he ensures that the audio and visuals are consistent in the version that gets stitched together each week. Services at Passion City Church DC are a combination of these worship videos, recordings of the “hosting” (welcome) and “giving” (tithing) portions of the service, and Stuart’s prerecorded sermon, which are all filmed on separate days and edited together.

But at 9 AM Sunday morning, before their 10 AM digital service, Stuart and all of Passion City Church volunteers (called “doorholders”) gather on a call to share stories about what God has been doing and pray together. This helps their community stay connected while they can’t physically be together and helps reinforce the fact that people aren’t just “watching a show” on Sunday mornings. God is still at work. 

In this time of uncertainty, many people find themselves waiting for their physical circumstances to change: people are anticipating a vaccine, hoping for a sense of normalcy, or just wanting to be done quarantining. On a spiritual level, many may find themselves in the same place Stuart was in college, asking God hard questions and not knowing if He’s here listening. The waiting and wondering process can be discouraging, but for Stuart, this process isn’t a detour. In fact, it’s often part of God's plan for us. 

“He's comfortable with us experiencing the level of discomfort that we think is unnecessary,” Stuart said. “But He has purpose in that, and those purposes are deep and profound and beautiful.” 

---