United Methodist Church Westlake Village
Audio of Pastor Darren Cowdrey's weekly message, as we work together toward fulfilling our mission statement: "Setting a Course for a Better Life." Live-streamed weekly from our campus in Westlake Village, CA. Video of this entire worship service is available for viewing or listening on our home page at http://www.umcwv.org for approximately 3 weeks, and then also available on our YouTube channel at https://bit.ly/4hFmuBZ All songs used in compliance with our CCLI and streaming licenses.Copyright License # 1291056Streaming License #CSPL075029 If you'd like to support our ministries, please follow this link: https://give.tithe.ly/?formId=6fe0e233-47e0-4a4b-8d21-f21ad5e75db8
Episodes
A teenager with severe social anxiety writes letters to himself just to make it through the day and one of those pages ends up in the wrong pocket. From there, Dear Evan Hansen turns into a story about grief, loneliness, a lie that grows legs online, and a message that goes viral because people are starving to hear it. We walk through the plot and why it resonates in a moment when technology keeps us “connecte...
A lot of us learned Alexander Hamilton’s life just long enough to pass a test, then let it fade. So we’re bringing it back in a way that actually lands, through the Hamilton musical and one of its most tender moments: “It’s Quiet Uptown.” We talk through Hamilton’s rise from an orphaned childhood to the centre of the Revolutionary War and the founding of American government, then ...
In the second message in Pastor Darren's summer series on recent Broadway musicals, a diner waitress who names her feelings in pies might be the last place you expect to find a lesson on Christian self-worth, but "The Waitress" goes straight to the questions many of us avoid: What happens when your life stops feeling like it belongs to you? How do you come back from choices you regret, harm you didn’t de...
A gang story from the 1950s should not feel this current, yet The Outsiders still cuts close to the bone. We walk through the world of Greasers and Socs and the class conflict that fuels their rivalry, then trace how Ponyboy and Johnny get swept into tragedy, loyalty, and hard choices that no teenager should have to make. Along the way, we talk about why this story keeps resonating across generations and why it can ...
Think of the person you resent most, the one who still feels like a villain in your story. Now imagine God sending you to offer them a message of redemption and then imagine they actually repent. That is the emotional fuse at the heart of Jonah, and it’s why this ancient book still feels uncomfortably modern.
We walk through the ending of Jonah and focus on what the story is really exposing: not N...
Guilt has a way of shrinking your world until it feels like you’re living inside a sealed chamber, replaying the moment you wish you could erase. Jonah Chapter Two gives us one of scripture’s most human snapshots of that feeling: a prayer spoken from the belly of a big fish, where panic and regret finally slow down enough to become honesty before God. We follow the story’s sharp turn from Jonah&rsq...
God says “Go,” and Jonah says “Absolutely not” then buys a one-way ticket in the opposite direction. That blunt refusal is funny on the surface, but it also lands uncomfortably close to home, because most of us know what it feels like to dodge a calling, delay a hard act of trust, or offer God a carefully measured amount of commitment. We start by reading Jonah 1 straight through, including t...
A single line from a movie sticks with us: “What if empathy is an evolutionary advantage?” That question turns into a faith question fast, because so many of us have been trained to think empathy makes us soft, exposed, or easy to take advantage of. We push back on that assumption and explore how compassion can be real strength, the kind that steadies a community and makes room for people who are struggl...
Romans is not a calm textbook, it is a pastoral intervention. We start a new series by admitting the real-world challenge of tackling Paul’s most comprehensive letter in the middle of confirmation and graduation season, then we name why Romans still matters: it is written to a community trying to stay together while Jews and Gentiles bring different histories, habits, and assumptions into the same church. Paul...
The Holy Spirit does not wait for our permission, and that is both thrilling and unsettling. We start with the Pentecost story many of us know by heart, then take a sharp left into Numbers 11 where Moses hits a breaking point in the wilderness and God answers with a haunting question: “Is the Lord’s power limited?” When Spirit gets shared across seventy elders and then spills over onto two men outs...
Unity sounds beautiful until you try to live it with real people. Pastor Darren starts with Paul’s “body of Christ” image and makes it concrete: some of us are eyes who see a path forward, some are ears who listen, some are mouths who speak clearly, some are feet who keep momentum, some are hands who do the work, and some are hearts who keep watch over the community’s wellbeing. The laughter ...
Sequels are supposed to continue the story, but they also expose what we really loved about the original. We kick things off by arguing about the best movie sequels, then pivot to a bigger claim: the Holy Spirit is the “sequel” to Jesus, promised in John 14 as “another advocate” who stays with us forever. That word matters. Advocate means we are not alone, not abandoned, and not trying to liv...
A sign in Minneapolis says, “The bus does not stop here,” and it exposes something many of us do without noticing: we define ourselves by the places we refuse to go. From the way churches talk about belief to the way we talk about each other, “no” can start to sound like the whole message. We take that moment and turn it into a clearer, more hopeful question: where does the bus stop, and what...
A lot of faith language sounds comforting until you place it in real life where attention is weaponized, outrage is monetized, and everybody claims to know the truth. We lean into John 10 and ask a sharper question: how do you recognize Jesus’ voice when so many voices are trained to hook you first?
We walk through Jesus’ three self-descriptions in the Good Shepherd: teaching, gatekeeper, gate, an...
Surprise doesn’t happen often, so when a story hits you with it four times, it’s trying to wake you up. We sit with Luke 24 and the Emmaus Road, where disciples stumble through grief, confusion, and the kind of disappointment that sounds painfully modern: “We thought he was the one.” They’ve heard about an empty tomb, yet they still feel detached and disenchanted, and we name that exper...
Earthquakes, lightning, guards collapsing, a once-in-history moment that feels too big to miss. That’s one way the resurrection story gets told, and it can quietly train us to believe God only shows up when life gets cinematic. We start by looking at Matthew’s dramatic Easter scene, then we slow down and notice who actually stays standing: the women who come in grief, with questions, ready to do the hard...
A triumphal entry is supposed to end with a coronation, but this one fades out. We follow Jesus into Jerusalem and slow down long enough to notice the strange choices: a donkey instead of a stallion, palm branches instead of fine fabric, a crowd hungry for change but unsure what kind of king they are actually welcoming. That tension is the doorway into a bigger question: what happens when our faith is built on outco...
Freedom sounds simple until you actually have it. The wilderness is where you learn what still owns you, what you keep reaching for, and what kind of community you’re becoming while you figure it out. That’s why the Ten Commandments arrive when they do in Exodus: not as random religious rules, but as guidance for newly freed people learning how to live without Pharaoh in their head.
We walk throug...
Freedom can be terrifying when it doesn’t come with a full pantry and a clear map. We pick up the Exodus story right after the escape through the Red Sea, when the Israelites hit the wilderness and start wishing they were back in Egypt. It’s a startling moment of spiritual honesty: when the future feels uncertain, even slavery can start to look “stable.” We sit with that anxiety and ask what ...
What if salvation isn’t a status but a way of standing in the world? We follow the sweep from the burning bush to Passover to the Red Sea and ask how a people learn to live free. Along the way, the commands that once sounded strange—choose a lamb, paint blood on your door, eat in haste—turn into a training ground for trust. The Israelites don’t signal God’s memory; they form their own. ...
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