Faith Over Feelings: From Scumbag to Shepherd

31 July

Dave Jensen

Dave Jensen grew up in a house full of Christians. His father was the Archbishop of Sydney. His uncle, his brother, his cousin, his brother-in-law — all in ministry. Most people he knew were genuine, committed followers of Jesus, and he understood exactly what that looked like.

He just didn't have it himself.

For most of his twenties, Dave would have described himself as a Christian without a moment's hesitation. It would have felt wrong to say otherwise, like cutting off his family, like denying something he believed was true at some abstract level. He had dog tags in the army with "Church of England" stamped on them. He never doubted the truth of Christianity. He just lived as though it was completely irrelevant.

That gap between belief and life would close suddenly, unexpectedly, on an ordinary hungover morning in Darwin. But to understand why it mattered so much when it did, we start in Newtown.

Growing Up Between Two Worlds

Newtown in the 1980s was not a suburb that made it easy to be a Christian. It was diverse in the with many families from different background, who were living alongside a significant heroin problem, pub culture, and a thriving hardcore punk scene. Dave found himself embedded in all of it. He went to shows in rehearsal studios and living rooms at thirteen and fourteen. He stood outside pubs he was too young to enter.

At the same time, he lived at Moore College, the Sydney Anglican Bible college, inside a community where almost everyone he knew was genuinely Christian. It was two worlds, pressing against each other.

He went to Trinity Grammar for high school, where he was one of only two kids from Newtown. Nobody else at school went to church. Greek Orthodox families had their Easter services. But the idea of regular, committed Christian faith was, for his peers, basically foreign.

For Dave, the contrast was always clear: here is Jesus, and here is the world, and they are very different things. He just spent his teenage years gravitating toward the world.

The Army, a Marriage, and a Decade of Drift

At 20, Dave got a girl pregnant. They married, had two kids and he joined the army. By 22, he was divorced. He spent the rest of his twenties in Townsville and Darwin, moving through postings with the infantry.

By his own description, he was a piece of work. Violent. A liar. Promiscuous. He held an officer's rank and used it to manipulate others for his own ends. His describes his knuckle, a misshapen lump halfway up his hand from a pub fight that he refused to get treated, with the kind of wry detachment.

None of it, Dave says, felt like a departure from Christianity. He still believed it to be true. He was living as though it wasn't. No one in his family ever sat him down and told him plainly that he wasn't a Christian. They were too gracious, or perhaps too aware of what those conversations can do. Instead, his twin sister Katy took a different approach by loading his laptop with sermon audio he couldn't get rid of, tucking John Piper paperbacks into birthday parcels with handwritten notes that read, essentially: you're an idiot, but you should read this.

He calls it abusive evangelism. He means it as a compliment.

The Morning After in Darwin

One morning Dave woke up having been out the night before. He opened his laptop. Instead of skipping the sermons, this time he watched one. Then another. Then another. He spent hours working through John Piper clips, and two things became clear to him with sudden, disorienting force.

The first was that this felt like brand new information. He had grown up reading the Bible at dinner, praying with his family, surrounded by genuine believers, and somehow, hearing the gospel explained this way felt like he was encountering it for the first time. The veil, he says, was lifted.

The second thing was fear. Not the polite, abstract discomfort of someone who finds religion distasteful. A genuine, gut-level, oh my goodness, what have I done reckoning with his own sin.

He picked up the phone and called Tim, an army chaplain he'd known for ten years, and opened with what he now recognises as the giveaway line of every nominal Christian who's approaching something real: I don't think I've been a very good Christian.

Tim laughed. Then he laid it out plainly: “Dave, your name is a byword for scumbag”. He listed all the specifics: the violence, the lying, the manipulation, without softening any of it. Dave, who by his own admission would normally have responded to that kind of directness poorly, just responded with: “Yep. Yep. Yep.”

What made Tim's directness land was a decade of earned relationship. Tim wasn't judging Dave, he was describing him. They read Romans chapter 5 together where it says “While you were still a sinner, Christ died for us”. He explained that Jesus didn't die for people who had cleaned themselves up, but for people exactly like Dave.

Dave prayed until he fell asleep. He woke up the next day knowing he was a Christian.

Christianity Multiplies Problems

The first thing that changed was the simplest: Dave loved Jesus Christ. He hadn't cared before. Now he did. It wasn't a theory or an obligation. It was, as he puts it, just a switch.

What followed was not a smooth transformation. He was two weeks out from becoming a Christian, back on the drink and chasing women, when he noticed something had genuinely shifted. The behaviour caught up slowly, in fits and starts. The heart had changed faster than the habits.

He has a line he uses often now when speaking about evangelism: Christianity didn't solve my problems. It multiplied them. Because where before he could lie without a second thought, now every lie came with immediate conviction. Before he could be violent without consequence, now the gospel pressed on him. He says he was so deep in the thorn bush of sin that he had to quit robbing banks before he could think about swearing.

Finding His Thing

After finishing his army posting, Dave made a deliberate move back to Sydney with the intention of joining a church. He ended up at a Church By the Bridge in Kirribilli, where it felt immediately like home. He hasn't missed a Sunday of church in sixteen years.

From there, ministry followed. He served in the youth team, got involved with beach mission, and eventually found himself as the youth minister at The King's School — a thousand students, a thousand-seat auditorium, two percent Christian, all of them packed into chapel together. It was a trial by fire for someone who'd previously managed men in the infantry. Teenagers, he discovered, operate on entirely different rules.

He found them maddening. He also found them exhilarating, because they're open, willing to talk, and if you can grab their attention, genuinely responsive. It was at King’s that Dave discovered preaching. Not the mechanics of it, but the conviction that it matters, that the word of God gripped people through it, that he was swimming with the tide when he stood up and talked about Jesus.

He worked on it. Hard. He rehearses in the car, talking through his talks on every drive, making edits out loud, letting the repetition ingrain the material. He watches himself back and finds things to fix. He received the formative feedback early from Ray Galea who told him plainly: you need to be less of yourself. Your yelling works for some people and intimidates others. What are you willing to sacrifice so more people can love God more?

That question has shaped how Dave preaches ever since.

Life Surprises

Dave met his wife Sam at Kirribilli. She was seven years younger, from a non-Christian family, had walked away from faith after high school and walked back in one night after finishing a shift at the pub next door to the church. They got engaged within six months and married within a year.

They have four boys: Suonny, Joe, Jesse, Frank, and a sausage dog named Slinky, and live on the Central Coast. The thing Dave and Sam care about most, above everything else, is that their kids know Jesus. Not that they turn out well, or that they succeed academically, or that they build good careers. That they know Jesus.

So they never whinge about church in front of the kids. They pray for the pastor on the drive there. They want their children to feel that church is where the action is, and their boys have started having their birthday parties at youth group, inviting non-Christian mates along because they actually want to be there.

Be Kind to Yourself

Dave's natural proclivity, he says, is to loathe himself. And there's a version of Christian growth that feeds that instinct, where the more you mature, the more sin you see in yourself, and the more sin you see, the more you hate yourself for it, in an accelerating spiral that looks like seriousness but actually pulls you away from the gospel rather than toward it.

John Newton, he points out, was once a man who raped a woman on a slave ship while calling himself a Christian. His famous line from later in life: “I am a great sinner and Christ is a great Saviour”, wasn't evidence that he had become worse. It was evidence that he had grown more honest. The pathway forward is not self-hatred. It's repentance and faith, repentance and faith, grounded in the love of Christ.

He points to John 21, Jesus restoring Peter, not with a lecture on failure, but with the same question asked three times: do you love me? The core of the Christian life, Dave says, is not functional performance or numerical growth or theological precision. It's the love of God. It's being loved by Christ, and loving him back, and letting that be the engine of everything.

He spent a decade in Darwin not caring about Jesus. Then one morning he did, and it changed everything.

Listen to the full conversation with Dave on Episode 219 of the Chip Lunch podcast, available wherever you listen to podcasts.