Eden: Thank you so much for being willing to interview with me today. I’m really excited to talk to you. As I mentioned before, we did a Bible project for our website where we made a page of resources on every book of the Bible (See Bible Resources). And for that, I looked at a lot of different commentaries from different series and would try to pick commentaries that had a pastoral tone and were easy for a newer believer to understand. I encountered a lot of your commentaries through the Preaching the Word series, and they were such a blessing to me. So I’m excited to talk to you a little bit today and get to know you.
For our listeners, I usually like to get to know you a little bit at first before we dive into some questions. So what are a couple of things that bring you joy?
Dr. Douglas O’Donnell: What brings me joy? Great question. Certainly my family. My wife. I enjoy going on walks with her, talking with her. I enjoy hanging out with my family. One of the things I’m most looking forward to is our little family vacation that we’ll do in the early August together. I really enjoy reading (kind of what I do for a living). Reading and writing bring me a lot of joy. So I’m grateful. Preaching brings me joy. Sharing God’s Word with others. So those are a few things.
Eden: Awesome. Tell us a little bit about your ministry and where God has you involved.
Dr. Douglas O’Donnell: Sure. I’ll sort of walk backwards. I’ve done 17 years of ministry in the local church as a pastor, associate pastor, senior pastor, all in the Chicagoland area, three years as a professor overseas in Brisbane, Australia at Queensland Theological College and then almost four years here at Crossway as the Senior Vice President of Bible Editorial. Crossway is divided with a book side and a Bible side. My specific job is more content creation or creation of products. I’m sort of on the front end of things. If we want to do a new study Bible, what should we do, and who should we reach out to to be the general editor or editors, contributors? Either I’m working with an idea that someone’s brought to me, or I’m creating my own idea, or our chief publishing officer, our president, they’ve got ideas, and we’re sort of brainstorming about them. That’s a lot of my job is, sort of the front end, and then others take over with project management of the project.
The other thing I do, probably 50% of my job, is actually writing. I’m kind of a writer in residence. I’ve done Bible studies, I’ve done children’s curriculum—just a few examples of major writing projects. I’m working on a hymnal with Getty Music now and doing some of the liturgical elements for that. That’s the gist of my ministry over the years and specific callings, and my new calling here at Crossway.
I still preach quite a bit. I’m preaching in chapel and at local churches. My family, for four years, has gone to Chapelstreet Church in Geneva. I’ve been friends with some of the pastors there for a long time. We’ve got a committee for ministry training where we support young men in seminary education and then beyond as they come into ministry. I’m on the board of that, helping navigate who we should pick and supporting those young men who come along.
Eden: Very neat. When it comes to Crossway, books, and projects, do you have a favorite project that you’ve seen come to fruition?
Dr. Douglas O’Donnell: A lot of the projects I’m working on are long term. We’ve got two major commentary series that are just starting. I might not see those in my lifetime. We’ll see. The one that definitely comes to mind is The Biggest Story Children’s Curriculum, by Kevin DeYoung and Don Clark. I, with a small team, wrote the lessons for the curriculum. That was a massive project that took many years. It’s great to see it bound and being used by churches and people at home, as well.
Eden: Awesome. I was reading your commentary on the Song of Solomon (The Song of Solomon: An Invitation to Intimacy), and at the end of one of those chapters, there was a little bit on your testimony, and I thought it would be really fun to hear the whole thing. Would you be willing to share how the Lord saved you and came into your life?
Dr. Douglas O’Donnell: I would be happy to. I was actually delighted that you asked me that, especially going into preaching. It’s always good to remind ourselves before we get up to preach what God has done in our own lives. It happened a long time ago, but it still greatly affects me to this day.
I was born and raised in Chicagoland, in Addison, Illinois, close to Wheaton. I was a very devout Catholic, from a Roman Catholic family. Douglas Sean Michael O’Donnell is my full name—very Irish Catholic. My mom is from Scotland (Scottish Catholic). My dad is from Ireland. I was raised in a very religious home. Not in a strict way or necessarily a bad way. I learned a lot of wonderful truths about the Christian faith. I was a very devout Catholic as a boy. I was an altar boy, a Eucharistic Minister. I always went to Mass on Sunday, and Holy Days of Obligation.
I was a good kid outwardly as we kind of move into high school years, by the defining ethics of a high school person, at least in my time: I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, I was a virgin, and I did all these religious things. So I was a good Catholic kid, again, on the outside.
I was good at sports. I was the best basketball player in our high school and first team all area. I was good in school. I surprised myself my freshman year. I was in regular class, and then I got straight A’s, which surprised me. I was at a Catholic school and one of the brothers said to me, “We want you to go into an honors program.” So I went into an honors program. I certainly wasn’t the smartest kid, but I got a good education, and I did well in school. I had everything going for me up to age 18. I’m a good athlete. I’m a good student from a healthy family, and a good kid who prays to God, goes to church—all these sorts of things.
After my senior year, during the summer after I graduated, I started dating a girl named Jenny. We both went to the same high school and had known each other for a long time. We quickly became physical, and I lost my virginity. I think in my own mind I justified it in that I really loved her: Unlike my other friends who are goofing around, fooling around, have no sort of commitment, I really love her. I want to marry her. This is a true love forever. And so that’s at least how I justified it in my mind.
Well, we both went away to college, and we’re both playing college basketball—Division 3—about an hour and a half away. A month into college I go up to visit her and she has the sense that maybe she’s pregnant. I remember, she goes to the bathroom, takes the pregnancy test, and brings it out. The instructions say something like, “in four minutes, you’ll be able to tell if it’s a cross. It means pregnant. If it’s a negative, it’s not pregnant.” As soon as I looked at the thing, it was starting to form a cross. I remember, Wow. Here we are. We’re both 18 years old. We loved each other but what? So what we did then was we—well, she said to me shortly thereafter, “Well, are you going to marry me?” And I said, “Of course.” So we walked to the chapel of the campus, and I basically proposed to her.
Then we had to tell everybody what was going on. We were both from very devout Roman Catholic homes. So it was very shocking news, very hurtful news, as we told her parents and my parents and got kind of the sense of, “didn’t we teach you better?” Not like direct shame, but indirect shame. Maybe some direct shame, maybe rightly so. And I think at that time, as hard as that was, as you can imagine, I think we were committed to each other. We thought we’d see this through. We decided we would both quit college and we would quit basketball then as well. We moved home. We started working together at a carpet and tile company. I was out on the road with the guys doing all the tough stuff like ripping up carpet and laying some tiles that were easy to do, manual labor, hard labor. She was working secretarial for the company.
Things were not getting better for us. And I’m sure for anyone in this situation, it can be so stressful on people and on the family units as well. There were some hard things and some hard discussions that were going on. But I’ve always been an optimistic person. I’m like, we’ll get through all this. And she didn’t want to be married until after the baby. She didn’t want to be pregnant while she was in a wedding gown. I said that’s fine. So we decided on that. Our son Sean Michael O’Donnell, a good little Irish boy, was born on June 23rd, 1991, 33 years ago. And I remember when Sean was born, going into the hospital room and just touching—
Sorry, I’m a crier.
Eden: That’s okay. Me, too.
Dr. Douglas O’Donnell: We can cry together. With little babies, they just wrap their hand around you. I remember thinking, Wow, I know that I created this child, but there’s something bigger than me. There’s a Creator. I believed in God as Creator, but it was sort of a fresh experience.
After Sean was born, things didn’t get better. They only got worse between Jenny and me. And six months after he was born, right before Christmas, she decided to break up with me for good. It was during that time, now I was working as a janitor, working second shift, 3:30pm to midnight, that I had lots of time to think about things. God began to work in my life. I felt like I lost everything I loved. I lost my fiancé, I lost my son to some extent. Now I’m paying child support. I get to visit him, but not as often as every day. I wasn’t in school anymore. I lost the love of learning and education. I wasn’t a basketball player anymore, which was my identity for so many years. So I felt like I lost everything I love.
But during that time, God began to really work in my heart. And the two truths that he taught me through his Spirit was (one, that) the only relationship that lasts forever is between man and God, people and God, and this sort of “true love forever” that I thought was going to last forever didn’t even last two years. I looked on my parent’s marriage over 25 years, at that time, and I thought, Well, one of them is going to die before the other or something can happen. I think I always had this idealistic view of human love, like, that’s all I really need is human love. And it was quickly taken away from me and I realized there was a greater love. I knew my part in the creation of my son, but I had a greater view of God as Creator on the day he was born. Similarly, a greater sense of there’s human relationship, but then there’s something beyond human relationship that is more ultimate and meaningful. So that was one truth.
The second truth is that I was a sinner (Romans 3:11, 23). That sounds pretty simple. A lot of times in the Catholic tradition, you’re a sinner. You’re someone who sins. You go to the priest, you receive absolution, and then you’re okay again. So I never had the identity as someone who was a sinner. For the first time in my life, I realized I’m full of sin, I’m full of lust, and I’m full of pride. It was my identity. Deep down, that’s who I was, this really good kid on the outside. But all that had happened to me showed what was on the inside.
So with those two truths running through my mind, I came home from work. It was 1:00 in the morning, I was living with my parents, went to my downstairs bedroom apartment and got on my knees and began to weep. And I said, “Jesus, I know you’re real. I’ve never doubted your existence. I’ve never doubted you’re the Son of God. But will you forgive me? Because I’m full of sin. I’m full of lust. And from this day forward, I’ll put you first in my life.”
That was my sinner’s prayer. That was a sincere prayer. I felt like the weight of the world fell off my shoulders as [John] Bunyan describes (The Pilgrim’s Progress). And I had had religious experiences before, so I didn’t know what this was, but something happened there. This was kind of amazing. I felt forgiven. I felt God’s presence but didn’t really have concepts, evangelical concepts, of “born again.” Of course, that’s what happened. I was regenerated (What Does It Mean to Be Born Again?)(Titus 3:5). But I knew something had happened in my life. And I knew that especially because when I started to walk back in the same paths of sin, I was very convicted and shouldn’t be doing that anymore (1 Thessalonians 1:4-5). As I began to pray more sincerely, I started to think differently about prayer. I used to pray often to Mary, and I stopped praying to Mary. It was a very strange thing for a Catholic kid to do, but I just stopped. I wasn’t convicted. I just stopped praying [to her].
Then I began to devour the Bible. I’ve got some issues with dyslexia. I never read a book till I was 19, until I was converted. Then I began to devour the Bible and read the whole thing through. And I was especially struck by Jesus and the Gospels and who he is, and how much emphasis is placed on him, and not Mary and the saints and other rituals that I was doing. I kept expecting there would be something I’d read that would resonate with these sorts of practices I do in my Catholic walk and couldn’t find them. And so God began to change me and mold me through the reading of the Word. As time went on, I began sharing this experience with people at church. [At this point] I’m still going to Catholic Church and not finding any resonance with people that I knew. They were kind of like, “oh, good for you.” They didn’t want to talk about Jesus. Everyone’s kind of going through the motions as I had been going through the motions. That is not every Catholic everywhere. That was my experience in a particular church.
I remember thinking that I’d really love to connect with this person who I played basketball with in something called the Prairie State Games, which is kind of an Olympics for Illinois. Through God’s providence (his name was Mark Davidson) God connected us through his girlfriend, who was sitting next to me at a class at COD (College of DuPage—I started going back to school). So we connected. She connected with Mark. I told him my testimony. He gave me a Bible study booklet that I worked through. I was on the pastoral epistles of all things. So he began to teach me what I should be doing, how I should be reading the Bible. And then, he was very gentle and patient, but at some point he said, “You know, have you ever thought about going to Protestant church?” And I was like, “no!” That’s like the greatest sin—to go to a Protestant church. As a kid on family vacations, it had to be a Catholic church. And I always wondered, there’s all these churches in town, why do we have to go to this church? So that was ingrained in my mind. But there was something about it that I was like, well, maybe I should do that. I talked to my older brother who knew someone who was born again. He wouldn’t have put it that way. And he said, “You should go with her and her husband to church.”
So I went to church with them and really felt like, wow, the pastor is speaking to me. I was talking to people. So many people had conversion stories, some of them from Catholic backgrounds. Someone in the church began to mentor me. Then eventually I started wanting to go back to school full time. I thought, well, maybe I’ll even make a basketball comeback. So I started to go to the weight room and work out and met Jeff Frazier, who’s the senior pastor of Chapelstreet Church now. He was the person running the weight room. We connected there and with a number of guys involved in sports evangelism and stuff. So I began to grow in leaps and bounds. I decided I would come to Wheaton College. Played basketball for a year and got injured. There’s a lot to that story too, but eventually I hung it up. At Wheaton I flourished. I couldn’t believe I was with all these people who love Jesus and these professors who knew the Bible and loved Jesus. I roomed with a group of guys who, all but one, are still in full time pastoral ministry. I met my wife at College Church in the college group. Then we went on from there.
Eden: That’s beautiful. That is awesome. During those years, were you pretty involved in Sean’s life? Did your conversion change your perspective on your relationship with Sean at all?
Dr. Douglas O’Donnell: Yeah, I was very involved in Sean’s life. I had him every weekend. He would come when I was at Wheaton, for example. I’m in my early 20s. I got this little toddler baby I carry around and people would be like, “Oh, who’s that?” I’d be like, “It’s my son,” and nobody would believe me. I’d be like, “No, he’s actually my son!”
Very involved. We would take Sean to church with us and had a lot of wonderful people at College Church invest in him personally. His mom struggled in a lot of different ways, but one was through alcohol and drug addiction. She decided when he was 12 that she would give me full custody and that he should come live with us, which was a huge decision. So he lived with us from 12 to 18 before college. I had married Emily at that point, and then we had four children. So it was a crazy household. We had a teenage boy and then one after the other, four children. But it was good that Sean could grow up in a loving home and have these siblings and things like that.
Eden: Yes. Wonderful. As you were talking, you said that when you were convicted over your sin, you were convicted over lust and pride and that you saw yourself as a good person. How would you say the Lord changed your character after you came to know him?
Dr. Douglas O’Donnell: I think my religion became heart religion. I’m eternally grateful for the things my parents taught me, and even the Catholic Church taught me, about the Trinity, about how to pray, about Jesus’ identity, his personhood, his work—all of those things. God used all of that to save me. I had enough facts in my head for him to save me, taking all of those mechanics and giving it a new heart. I had the mechanics then to grow, and I had the discipline, and certain things like prayer that I could continue on in a different way—and especially not what I would be saying, but who I’d be saying it to. Instead of, oh, I should do ten Our Fathers and the more I do, maybe the better and the more God will hear me, I prayed more short and sincere prayers like “Help me, Lord.” Or, “should I do this?” Things like that.
I think character formation and a lot had to do with sitting under the Word, but also having godly friends. I mentioned at Wheaton [College] we were all keeping each other mutually accountable with sexual ethics and with pride too. Even my story about my basketball comeback and having an injury, I think was God’s way of humbling me. He humbled me in a number of different ways. My character formed a lot through communion with God, but also community. College Church was so instrumental to me, Kent Hughes, Randy Gruendyke.
Eden: It’s so neat to hear—you talked about at the beginning—how God is the ultimate lover, essentially (Jeremiah 31:1). How human love is one thing, but it points to the ultimate love of God. I think about—hearing your story—how God is the great pursuer, and you can see, even when you were holding your little boy’s hand for the first time, God was speaking to you about himself. God chased you down into your bedroom that night and God surrounded you with people like that woman whose husband you would connect with. It’s so neat to see how our lives are transformed. But you can see God in the shadows doing his work to pursue us in love. And that’s so encouraging to hear, and be reminded of his work. So thank you so much for sharing with us.
Dr. Douglas O’Donnell: You’re very welcome.
Eden: It’s a delight to hear about his work in your life.
I typically like to ask if there is a book or a resource that has transformed your walk with Jesus, that’s really been instrumental in your walk with him?
Dr. Douglas O’Donnell: Yeah, there’s a number of resources. I could do this quickly. I’m trying to think of my Christian journey that’s often defined by books I read. Probably the most influential early on, this relates a lot to my conversion, was Augustine’s Confessions, which is not an easy read for a new believer. The first part’s a little easier than the second. I think he was 33 when he was converted—sexual past, these sorts of things. So I was reading his story. I was like, yeah, this is me! And then he went into theological education and teaching. I thought, oh, there’s someone else in history a long time ago who experienced the grace of God, and God called him into ministry. He spent his life writing books and helping the church in that way.
Another popular level book was Elisabeth Elliot’s Passion and Purity. A girl at Wheaton gave it to me when she heard my testimony. And I thought, this book is so great. It’s normally for women to read but I read it through, and I was like, yes, I know this is all true. So that was an influential book.
Then one of my favorite books, and this is a great resource. I know you want to help new believers with this ministry. John Stott’s book Why I’m a Christian. It’s an old book, but it’s a wonderful, short book that I often go back to even when I’m sharing my testimony or reasons why I’m still a Christian.
So those are a few. Maybe more than you asked for.
Eden: Awesome. No, we love it. We love all the resources.
Well, thank you so much for your time and for sharing with us. It’s a joy to hear about your work, but also the work God has done in your life. Hopefully it’ll put a face to a name for anyone who picks up some of your writings from Crossway and helps them know who’s behind some of the inner workings of that publishing. So we’re really thankful for your time.
Dr. Douglas O’Donnell: Thank you, Eden.
Eden: Thank you so much for listening to our podcast today. If you enjoyed our conversation, I would encourage you to like or subscribe to our podcast so that you can hear the next conversation. And if something that you heard today spoke to your heart or got you thinking, I would encourage you to not let the day go by without talking to God about what’s on your mind. We believe that he loves you and that he’s pursuing you today out of that love.