Dave White was twenty-six years old when he preached his first sermon at Grace Covenant Church, a hundred and forty people in a converted feed store on the east side of Austin. He stayed forty-one years. When he stepped down in 2021, the congregation numbered near two thousand, but he will tell you the number he remembers is the four hundred and eleven funerals he presided over.

He came to ministry late by the standards of his generation — a decade in construction first, then night classes, then seminary with a wife and two small children. That working life never left his preaching. He is suspicious of abstraction, allergic to platform language, and prone to telling a story about a job site when a theologian would reach for a syllogism.