Dr. Ron Matthews at Ocean City Tabernacle

You Missed Something Extraordinary

There are mornings at the Ocean City Tabernacle when you walk in expecting a Sunday service and walk out having experienced something you can’t quite categorize. June 7th was one of those mornings.

Dr. Ron Matthews — President of Eastern University, master pianist, and lifelong student of worship — led the 8:30 AM Traditional Service in a way that was genuinely unlike anything the Tabernacle stage typically sees. From the opening piano arrangement to the closing benediction, every element of the service was unified around a single, searching question: What does God keep inviting us toward?

The answer, woven through Psalms, Isaiah, the Gospels, Paul’s letters, and Revelation, was the same word repeated again and again across the breadth of Scripture: Come.

Who Is Dr. Ron Matthews?

Dr. Ron Matthews is the President of Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania — but his story at Eastern began long before the president’s office. A gifted pianist and musician, Dr. Matthews served for 25 years as Chair of the Music Department at Eastern, shaping generations of students before the university’s board invited him into leadership. He is now in his ninth year as president.

Under his leadership, Eastern University has experienced nothing short of a miracle in growth — expanding from 3,000 students five years ago to over 10,000 today. He is also a man with deep roots in the Philadelphia region, a graduate of Cairn University’s tradition of faith-formed education, and a former Pastor of Worship Arts at Church of the Savior.

He is, in every sense, both artist and administrator — a rare combination. And on Sunday morning at the Ocean City Tabernacle, he arrived not with a lectern and lecture, but with a piano, a guest vocalist, and an entire service designed to take a room full of people on a journey through the most repeated invitation in all of Scripture: Come.

A Pianist, a President, and a Purpose

Before a word of teaching was spoken, Dr. Matthews had already said something profound — through his hands. He opened the service with piano arrangements of classic hymns, including At Calvary and Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, inviting the congregation into worship before asking anything of them intellectually.

He was joined by guest vocalist Perry Brisben, a dear friend and former colleague from Eastern’s music department — and together they created a sonic atmosphere that was as much a part of the message as the Scripture passages that followed.

“The word ‘come’ is used a lot today,” Dr. Matthews told the congregation as he introduced the theme. And he meant it — structuring the entire service as a series of divine invitations, each one drawing the room a step deeper into the presence of God.

“God gives us this invitation to love, serve, and experience him in our lives.”

Come and Praise. Come and Bow Down.

Anchoring the service in Psalm 95, Dr. Matthews led the congregation through two distinct but complementary invitations. The first: “Come, let us sing to the Lord” — joyful, exuberant, unembarrassed praise. The second, from the same psalm: “Come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our maker.”

It was a deliberate pairing — the exuberance of praise meeting the posture of humility. And Dr. Matthews was direct about what he wanted people to take home from it.

“Come, let us sing and praise,” he said in his closing summary. “One of the monitors for your life is that we should sing. Good, bad, noisy, beautiful — whatever. We should sing. It’s a discipline to sing.”

“If we can sing, we can probably say anything to anybody. That’s how hard it is to sing.”

Come and Confess. Come and Be Made Clean.

From praise, the service moved into one of its most tender moments — what Dr. Matthews called “joyful confession.” Drawing from Isaiah 1:18, he led the congregation through a time of corporate and silent reflection, framing confession not as shame but as liberation.

“Come, let us reason together, says the Lord,” the room read in unison. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.”

He invited a moment of silence — not passive, but active. “The spirit may prompt certain events that are plaguing you, events or relationships that you’ve probably prayed about on and on. They come back and they haunt you. Jesus doesn’t want us to go backwards. He wants us to go forward. The backwards part is when Christ died 2,000 years ago. The forward part is what we’re doing right now — living in the freedom of the gospel.”

“There are no secrets. There is a joy and a liberty in the God who created us and is wooing us to himself.”

Four Kinds of Joy — Including the One Nobody Wants to Talk About

When Dr. Matthews turned to teaching, he brought the same elegant structure to his content that he had brought to the music. He walked the congregation through four distinct biblical expressions of joy — each one a different facet of the same unshakeable reality.

First: the joy of Christ’s presence. From John 15:11, Jesus promises that his joy — found in abiding in the Father — would be in his followers, and their joy would be full. “Jesus offers with that same quality of love to abide in us and that our joy will be filled,” Dr. Matthews said. “It’s a beautiful gift and an invitation.”

Second: the joy of the Holy Spirit. Walking through the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5, he made a quiet but powerful point: this fruit isn’t manufactured by effort. “The fruit will grow. We just walk in the spirit together and they’ll be really fruitful — all these virtues and fruits and values that just well up in us.”

Third — and the one he admitted he’d rather skip: the joy of suffering. He read James 1:2-4 with the directness it deserves: “Count it all joy when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.” His honesty landed: “Honestly, there are a couple of reasons I don’t like to talk about it. Because you only get that joy if you suffer. And I’d rather not suffer.”

Fourth: the joy of the commandment. Returning to Philippians 4:4 — the same text Dr. Crawford Loritts had preached on the week before from a different angle — Dr. Matthews framed it as a discipline: “Rejoice. And if you have any doubt, say it again. Rejoice.”

“Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory.”

A Jazz Teacher, a Hospice Bed, and the Beauty of Suffering

The most personal and memorable moment of the morning came when Dr. Matthews told the story of his jazz teacher — a man who poured into him for years despite what the teacher considered his student’s spectacular lack of discipline.

The teacher, battling three forms of cancer, asked Dr. Matthews to come for one final lesson at his hospice bed. When Dr. Matthews arrived, the teacher looked at him and said — colorfully, by Dr. Matthews’ own admission — “You were the absolutely worst student I ever had in my life.”

A pause. And then: “You’re my last student. And I picked you because you were my best student.”

Dr. Matthews dedicated a jazz arrangement of Joy to the World to that teacher — playing it with the right hand melody running backwards and the left hand cycling through three different keys. “You’re going to hear all cacophonous stuff,” he warned the congregation with a smile. “And yet in the end, it’s about the beauty of life.”

It was a perfect musical sermon: dissonance and resolution. Suffering and joy. The two, inseparable.

“He lived long enough to hear me dedicate my Christmas jazz album to him. And this piece is about the joy that’s found in suffering.”

Come, Lord Jesus — The Final Invitation

As the service drew toward its close, Dr. Matthews gathered all six threads of invitation into a single summary — a roadmap for the life of faith that was at once simple and breathtaking in its scope.

Come and praise. Come and bow down. Come and be made clean. Come to Jesus for rest. Come to the kingdom through service. And finally, from Revelation: “Come, Lord Jesus. Behold, I am coming soon.”

“Jesus will come again,” he said simply. “God be praised.”

Guest vocalist Perry Brisben then led the room in a soaring rendition of Worthy Is the Lamb, and the Tabernacle filled with voices declaring what the whole morning had been building toward.

The benediction that followed said it all: “Go forth in joy and in peace to love and serve the Lord and each other. Amen.”

“Come, Lord Jesus. Behold, I am coming soon. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.”

A Closing Word — and a Room That Responded

What made this service so distinctive — and so worth watching in full if you weren’t there — is that Dr. Matthews didn’t separate the music from the message. They were the same thing. Every hymn, every piano arrangement, every moment of congregational reading was another verse in a sermon that never stopped preaching.

It was also a morning that felt deeply personal to Ocean City. Dr. Matthews spoke warmly about his relationship with Tom Sherf, his affection for the region where he was formed, and the miraculous growth he has witnessed at Eastern University. There was a homecoming quality to the whole service.

The Tabernacle’s 2026 Summer Series is in full swing — and if the first three Sundays are any indication, this is a summer you do not want to watch from the sidelines.

Watch the Full Service — Ocean City Tabernacle on YouTube

If you missed Dr. Ron Matthews’s message in person, the full service is available now on the Ocean City Tabernacle’s official YouTube channel. Watch it, share it, and come back next Sunday.

Watch Dr. Ron Matthews: “Come: God’s Invitation to Joy” —  youtube.com/watch?v=8DPSGYo6LrQ

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