Pastor Don St. John has pastored the First Southern Baptist Church in Red Bluff since 2014.   His first love is God, then his wife and then children and his passion is to love the Body of Christ.  The church he pastors is located at 585 Kimball Rd. Red Bluff, CA.

If you are looking for a church that doesn’t spend half the time singing songs but gets into the ‘meat of the Word of God’, then you should give this church a try.  What Pastor Don St. John does is teach ‘Expository’ style teaching, or ‘Whole Counsel of God’s Word’.  It’s about the whole Bible, not just bits and pieces.  This type of preaching/teaching is rare nowadays, and I only know of a handful of churches in northern California that teach that way.

Expository teaching is considered ‘line by line’ where the passage is explained in its historical context and the words are explained as they originally were intended. This is much different than a Pastor or Preacher reading something in the Bible and then talking about what ‘they think’ it means.  Here are some quotes from others about what Expository preaching means:

“Expository preaching is text driven preaching which allows the words (and especially the verbs), clauses, sentences, paragraph and macrostructure of a passage to shape and direct the message so that the exposition, illustration, application and exhortation of the sermon is true to and grounded in the scriptural text being proclaimed.”

—Dr. Daniel L. Akin, President, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

“Expository preaching is that mode of Christian preaching which takes as its central purpose the presentation and application of the text of the Bible. All other issues and concerns are subordinated to the central task of presenting the biblical text. As the Word of God, the text of Scripture has the right to establish both the substance and the structure of the sermon. Genuine exposition takes place when the preacher sets forth the meaning and message of the biblical text, and makes clear how the Word of God establishes the identity and worldview of the Church as the people of God.”

—R. Albert Mohler Jr., President, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

“The discourse [sermon] should spring out of the text as a rule, and the more evidently it does so the better . . . A sermon, moreover, comes with far greater power to the consciences of the hearers when it is plainly the very word of God not a lecture about the Scripture, but Scripture itself opened up and enforced.”

—Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Lectures To My Students (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1954), 7273.

“Expository preaching is that method of proclaiming the Scriptures that takes as a minimum one paragraph of Biblical text (in prose narrative or its equivalent in other literary genre) and derives from that text both the shape (i.e., the main points and sub-points of the sermon) and the content (i.e. the substance, ideas, and principles) of the message itself.”

—Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., “The Crisis in Expository Preaching Today,” Preaching II (1995-1996), 4.