Hi, I'm Matthew.
Born in West Texas, escaped to California in 2010. Raised on story. Currently pastoring a church, planning Disney vacations, playing hockey, and writing things on the internet since 2008.
I grew up in Abilene—the kind of West Texas kid always looking for adventure in the great wide somewhere. That restlessness turned out to be a feature, not a bug.
The quest took me to film school at UT Austin, where I fell in love with story in its most visual form. From there: a megachurch in San Antonio, seminary in Southern California, and eventually planting a church of my own. Each chapter cracked me open in ways I didn't see coming—and the thread running through all of them, it turns out, was the same one I started with. I've always been chasing a good story and trying to figure out how to tell it well.
I pastor Sacred Place in Rancho Cucamonga—a progressive, open-and-affirming United Church of Christ congregation I helped plant. We're small, we're scrappy, and we take the kingdom of God seriously even when we don't take ourselves too seriously.
I run Mouseways, a Disney vacation planning agency. My logic is simple: if you're going to believe in magic, you might as well help other people find it.
This blog has been running in some form since 2008—a record of someone figuring it out in public. Faith, story, parenting, and whatever I can't stop thinking about this week.
A few other things that are true about me: I've been an Anaheim Ducks fan since the franchise was born in 1993, and eventually I stopped just watching from the stands. I laced up skates in the fall of 2007, played my first games that winter, and haven't really stopped since. The same year I started writing in public, I started playing the game I'd loved from a distance my whole life.
I'm a husband to Christopher and a dad to Noah.