The Story So Far

I kept drifting during sermons — and not good drifting, either. Burritos-or-pizza drifting. The only fix that worked was to draw what was being said, literally draw it, right there in the pew.

On New Year's Day 2017, sketchysermons.com went live with the first sketchnote. I had no idea it was the first of hundreds.

Two years of drawing mostly for myself, and then the account: @sketchysermons. The first post was a challenge I'm still chewing on — “If we are not known by our love, then we are not following Jesus' command.”

Instagram is where every drawing has landed first ever since.

Suddenly every pastor in America was preaching to an empty room, and all of us were at home watching. I sketchnoted the first all-online Sunday — Jonah, praising God from the belly of the fish — and then just… kept going.

176 drawings in 2020. 243 in 2021. Nearly one a day at the peak, and almost 200 of them released as free downloadable PDFs.

The busiest stretch of all. Alongside the weekly sermons at Thomas Road (161 drawings and counting), the sketchbook widened out — quotes from writers, podcasters, and theologians, Bible verses, book summaries, and the occasional superhero.

By now the cast of characters was in the hundreds: Tim Keller, Beth Moore, Russell Moore, Jackie Hill Perry, Jocko Willink, Ted Lasso…

Three podcast invitations in three weeks — including Mike Rohde's Sketchnote Army. Mike wrote The Sketchnote Handbook, the book my whole technique came from, so being asked onto his show felt like a full circle.

A dozen more interviews have followed since.

Harvest House asked me to illustrate Tim Challies' graphic novel about Eric Liddell — the Olympic champion from Chariots of Fire who became a missionary in China.

My reaction, verbatim: “Oh mY WOrD I HavE tO GET STartED!!!!” Commissions closed. The long work began.

Three years after that announcement: a fully illustrated graphic novel telling Liddell's whole life — the track, the mission field, the internment camp. “They will run and not grow weary.”

The secret project, finally announced: for a couple of years I'd been illustrating The Sketchbook Bible for Thomas Nelson — 275+ drawings across all 1,408 pages of the NKJV. Prophets, disciples, temple objects, the Behemoth.

When the first boxes arrived I mostly just stared at them.

The complete Bible with hundreds of illustrations, in hardcover and leathersoft — with room in the margins for you to draw your own way through the text. The pew doodles grew up.

WordPress retired, and this site became what it was always meant to be: the complete archive — every drawing since 2017, in high resolution, free from the algorithm that decides what you see.

The robots from the old footer made the move too.