The Rev. Mack Dennis
Denomination: Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF)
Organization: First Baptist Church of Asheville, NC
Mack joined the First Baptist Church Asheville staff in 2016. In both his pastoral and scholarly work, Mack commends the ways God’s reconciling love is revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, for the sake of the church and world. He has a deep sense of call to pastoral ministry, bearing witness to the gospel’s transformational power, and honing the art and craft of Christian preaching and teaching.
A native of Henderson, NC, Mack was ordained to the ministry of preaching in 2003. After five years as pastor of First Baptist Church, Mt. Gilead, NC, he studied homiletics and reconciliation at Duke Divinity School (Th.D., ’14), and taught there as adjunct professor until 2016. He came to First Baptist Church of Asheville after serving as interim preacher at Warrenton Baptist Church in Warrenton, NC.
Mack’s interests lie at the intersections of preaching, biblical interpretation, theology, and reconciliation. Both his preaching and scholarly work are concerned with faithful responses to division, conflict, and violence. His dissertation explores the theology of faith leaders involved in The Greensboro Massacre and The Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He is the editor of The Luminous Word: Biblical Sermons and Homiletical Essays, an anthology of sermons and essays by Old Testament scholar, Ellen F. Davis (2016).
He lives in Asheville with his partner, Erin, and their two children.
Day1 Weekly Programs by The Rev. Mack Dennis
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What Keeps You Up At Night?
Tuesday November 28, 2023
I remember being abruptly awakened at 2:00 a.m. on a bitterly cold night. It was my wife. She said, “Wake up! It’s time!” Her water had broken. Our first child was on the way. How I’d longed across the pregnancy to know who this child would be. What color hair? What gender? Would they look more like their mother, or more like me? And when they were old enough to cry after a bad dream, who would they cry out for first – mom or me? My imagination about this long-awaited child was about to become real life. But when that wakeup call came, I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t terror stricken. I was elated. I was filled with adrenaline and joyful anticipation, as though someone had plugged me into a power grid and thrown the throttle-sized breaker from OFF to ON, and this great coming fulfillment of love made me “all flame.”