Sunday teaching from a Fullerton pulpit, patient and plainspoken.
Weekly messages recorded at First Evangelical Free Church in Fullerton, California, delivered in a warm, plainspoken teaching style that starts from a story and lands on a passage. Series run long — a year-plus through Acts, an eight-week stretch called Jesus Frees Us — with a rotating set of voices from the church taking the platform.
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Fullerton Free Podcast is the sermon archive of First Evangelical Free Church in Fullerton, California, running to hundreds of episodes. Most weeks the recording is a full Sunday message. Darin McWatters teaches frequently and introduces himself the same modest way each time — his name, and that he is one of the leaders there. Others take the platform too. Kellen Drewry opened Palm Sunday in Luke 19 with a prayer and then a set of honeymoon photographs from a freezing hike outside Whistler. Kristen Johnson and Christina Marandola devoted a Sunday to Bible translation, beginning with Grace reading Acts 2 aloud in Korean before returning to the English later on. The voices differ, the texture does not. Every message wants to be understood before it wants to be elegant. It typically starts from a lived-in scene and uses that as the door into a claim about scripture. Then it slows down. Verses get unpacked a phrase at a time, key lines repeated for emphasis, historical background supplied where it helps. Series here are long. Bloom, a study of Acts, ran more than a year and finished at Acts 28 with Paul under guard in Rome, still free enough to speak. The Easter message that followed, Running Free, sat in John 20 with friends who arrived at the tomb carrying fear and doubt and left carrying something else. That idea seeded an eight-week series, Jesus Frees Us, framed around freedom from anxiety and shame but also freedom toward love and away from selfishness — with a summer study of Esther planned as the break in the middle. The teaching does not dodge the harder ground. One message sat with how quickly people now project a political framework onto whatever anyone says, and with pastors around the country grieving a lost capacity for conversation across disagreement. The prayers are unhurried and specific, asking for solidarity with the neglected and the suffering, and for peace toward listeners weary of the news. Practical touches recur: an invitation to open a Bible or follow along on a phone, greetings aimed at guests, and a standing offer to send questions in for a midweek episode that digs further into whatever the church is studying. Nothing is performed at the listener. It reads as a room being taught by someone who expects the people in it to think, respond, and take it home. For anyone tracking a church's teaching year in real time, the feed offers the whole arc rather than isolated highlights.
Made for: Listeners who want full-length expository preaching rather than devotional shorts, especially those following a church through an entire book of the Bible. It suits members of the Fullerton congregation keeping up between Sundays and anyone drawn to accessible, application-first teaching.
What sets it apart: Rather than standalone talks, the feed captures multi-month series in sequence — a year in Acts, then an eight-week arc on freedom — so the teaching accumulates. A rotating group of teachers keeps the tone varied while the explanatory, story-first method stays constant.
Listen to sermons and podcasts from the services at the First Evangelical Free Church in Fullerton, CA
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Passage-led sermons connect Acts, Haggai and Christian doctrine to disagreement, suffering, testimony and the practical demands of church life.
Fullerton Free Podcast follows biblical books passage by passage, pairing expository preaching with direct application to congregational life.
Acts leaves the page and meets you amid political projection, shipwreck anxiety, and ordinary character.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Acts 28 becomes a lesson in character, public perception, and steady Christian witness.
Darren centers Acts 28 on a clear point: people cannot control how they are perceived, but they can still steward their character and keep reflecting the light of Jesus with consistency, in step with Matthew 5:16.
Acts 27 becomes a blunt lesson in trust when the water turns bad.
Kellen uses Acts 27 to trace a life that feels secure until the water turns rough. The opening sets Luke's first-person "we," Paul in chains, and the warning that goes unheeded, then keeps returning to the hard question of how God's goodness can stand beside a shipwreck.
A patient Acts sermon turns biblical history into a clear call to tell a changed-life story.
Kristen Johnson shapes the sermon around a clear charge: followers of Jesus have a story to tell. She moves through Luke's purpose in Acts, Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah, and Paul's Damascus-road commission in Acts 26, where the work is described as opening eyes from…
A sermon on Haggai that lets God's demand feel costly before turning toward shared faithfulness.
The sermon frames Haggai as a clash of urgent needs: people back home trying to rebuild ordinary life while the prophet names God's house still lying in ruins. Its best moments come when it does not soften that demand.
A careful sermon on Samaria, spiritual motives, and the discomfort of seeing old religious boundaries redrawn.
Acts 8 is framed as a turning point in which the gospel moves across a boundary the Jerusalem believers had not expected. Darren follows the line from Stephen's death and Saul's hostility to the Samaritan response to Philip's teaching, emphasizing that baptism and the Holy…
Two Bible translators unpack Scripture's hardest passages, from Revelation's 666 to the Witch of Endor.
Live sermons with Easter-shaped urgency.
A pastor teaches from Acts 21 about Paul's urgent journey back to Jerusalem during his third missionary journey, emphasizing the importance of connecting with churches along the way.
This episode introduces the final quarter of the book of Acts, focusing on Paul's imprisonment, trials, and journey to Rome as a prisoner, with context on its literary structure and significance.
Josh Coya preaches on the Book of Haggai, focusing on chapter one.
Darren leads a sermon from Acts chapter 8, focusing on the scattering of early Christians due to persecution.
This episode introduces a Bible study on Acts chapter 21, focusing on Paul's final moments under a friendly roof, while addressing the need for spiritual resilience amid challenging world events.
Exodus’s tabernacle instructions preserve more than a building plan: Carmen Imes calls the sanctuary a “group project” that gathered Israel around Yahweh’s presence.
Christina Marandola teaches Philippians 1:27–2:11 at Fullerton Free, arguing that union with Christ shapes a community that stands firm, struggles together, and resists intimidation.
Christina Marandola examines Philippians 1:12-30 and asks how Paul can write with joy while imprisoned and facing an uncertain Roman trial.
This episode introduces an eight-week topical series called 'Jesus Freezes' exploring how Jesus sets people free from negative emotions like anxiety and shame, and frees them to love and live victoriously.
This episode introduces an Easter-themed message titled 'Running Free' based on John chapter 20, while promoting a church podcast for deeper discussion.
A speaker begins with a prayer for Palm Sunday reflecting on Jesus as a humble king, then shares a personal story about a beautiful honeymoon hike in Whistler, Canada.
This episode discusses the beauty and significance of Bible translations, inspired by a scripture reading in Korean.
This episode concludes a lengthy Bible study series on the book of Acts, focusing on Acts 28:17-31 where Paul preaches the Gospel in Rome despite being a prisoner, emphasizing the ongoing work of Jesus through his followers.
Acts 28 sets the frame, and Darren keeps circling one plain point: character can still be stewarded when people decide who you are before they know you.
Kellen opens by thanking the church and then moves into Acts 27.
Kristen Johnson’s Fullerton Free Podcast sermon examines Paul’s defense before King Agrippa in Acts 26 and connects it to the theme “Tell Your Jesus Story.” Paul describes a Damascus-road encounter with Jesus, who sends him to open the eyes of Jews and Gentiles and proclaim forgiveness.
This episode introduces the final quarter of the book of Acts, focusing on Paul's imprisonment, trials, and journey to Rome as a prisoner, with context on why Luke emphasizes this section.
This episode is a church sermon discussing the spread of the gospel from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth, focusing on the Book of Acts and Jesus' teachings.