Hello, my name is Scott Bernardi
I was saved in 1974 between my first and second year of college at U.C. Berkeley, studying electronics engineering. I was married to my lovely wife Emily Bernardi in 1979. I invite you to visit her blog, Adventures In God. Over the next number of years we had five boys (!) Jonathan, Daniel, Matthew, Michael, and Timothy.
After working almost five years as an engineer, we loaded up a UHaul and took our two month old firstborn son to go to Oklahoma to attend Rhema Bible Training Center from 1982-1984. Upon returning to California from Oklahoma we were associate pastors in Concord, CA, and then took over a church as senior pastors in Antioch, CA in December of 1987. We renamed it to The Church at Antioch (Acts 13:1). It was a good name because the town of Antioch got its name from the Antioch of the Bible. It was a small church, about 60 people, and I worked full time the whole time we were there, for about 16 years.
You can see from that red thing I am holding that I am a musician. I played in rock and roll bands as a teenager before I was saved, and have been involved in the music ministry in every church we have been involved in since 1975. My wife and I were the praise and worship leaders in three different churches (one of them being our own).
I found out I could teach back in 1976. The ministry we were attending, Foothill Christian Center under Bill Magginis, had a class where we all prepared a teaching from the same outline, and two of us would get up each week and have a half hour to preach/teach our outline. There were about a dozen of us in our twenties in that original class. The first time I got up to present, I guess I surprised everyone. Pastor Bill said, “Where did you come from?” Two thirds of the people in that original class went on into ministry of some type. I received a prophecy that really defined how I minister: The wisdom is in your pen.
Over the years I’ve accumulated a lot of material. When the COVID-19 virus hit in 2020, our senior leader at Freedom House in Brentwood, CA, apostle Scott Purkey, challenged us to step up to the next level and ask the Lord what we should be doing. For me, it was to start a blog and publish a book that I wrote years ago but never published. It is available now.
My calling is that of a teacher. Even when I pastored for 16 years, it was really so I could have a place to teach on a regular basis. Something pretty humorous, later on we attended a church that had a “spiritual gifts” test as part of a series of classes they had to introduce people to the church. It’s like a spiritual aptitude test, it asks a bunch of questions and then you score it and it evaluates what kind of ministry you could be good at. I scored very high as a teacher – and pretty low as a pastor!
scott@hungryfortheword.com
