Pete used to say Romans 12 was his favorite summary of the gospel. I heard him say it about three weeks before he died — from a wheelchair, fighting a microphone that kept slipping out of position every time his failing body knocked it loose — and I leaned over to Dawn and whispered that mine was Ephesians 2. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Just two guys with two favorite chapters. It wasn’t until after he was gone that I understood I’d been given the other half of his sentence.
Ephesians 2 starts with the diagnosis. Dead. Not sick, not struggling, not doing your best — dead in trespasses, walking around anyway, following whatever the air was thick with that day. And then the hinge the whole chapter turns on: but God. Two words carrying the entire weight of a life. Not because of anything earned. Because he was rich in mercy.
Romans 12 is what happens next. It’s the “therefore” — present your bodies as a living sacrifice, be transformed, use whatever gift you were given, let love be genuine, bless the people who come against you, don’t be overcome by evil, overcome it with good. It’s not a chapter about being a better person. It’s a chapter about what a person looks like once they’ve actually been made alive.
Pete was Romans 12 with skin on. I met him in the early 2000s — 2003, maybe — at Laguna Calvary. We connected right away, the kind of connection that doesn’t need explaining. He worked at my shop for a stretch. Then he started his own church, and I’d come around now and then, close enough to call it fellowship, far enough that I never let it become what it could have been.
I didn’t understand why for a long time. It took years of my own excavation to see that it was never about him. I had a secret fear running underneath everything, a hunger for approval I wasn’t willing to name, and it kept me at arm’s length from a man who would have let me all the way in if I’d asked. Underneath that, if I’m honest, there was judgment too — some quiet accusation that he was still trading on his power and status from the biker world, still working an angle. It’s easier to keep your distance from a man when you’ve decided there’s something to protect yourself from.
Last year I finally saw it for what it was and told him. Both parts — the fear dressed up as caution, and the judgment dressed up as discernment. I made amends. And Pete, being Pete, being Romans 12 in a leather vest, didn’t defend himself or catalog my offenses back to me. He just drew closer. That’s the whole story of the man in one sentence. You’d expect distance to be the cost of that kind of confession. With Pete it was the opposite. My honesty didn’t push him away — it gave him more room to love me.
After that came the part I didn’t know was running out. He’d had a stroke, and something in both of us knew the clock had changed shape. Madeline and I kept our tradition — sushi, brought to his house instead of a restaurant, because that’s what fit now. That was our last dinner. I didn’t know it was the last one. I don’t think you ever do.
Then three weeks before he died, I watched him preach one more time — a wheelchair under him and a microphone he could barely keep in place — and he told the room that Romans 12 was his summary of the whole gospel. I believe him. I watched him live it for over twenty years — drawing closer instead of pulling away, blessing instead of settling scores, presenting himself, actually, as a living sacrifice long before anyone used that language about his funeral.
I still think Ephesians 2 is mine. I need the but God more than I need the “therefore” some mornings — I need reminding that I was dead before I need instruction on what to do now that I’m alive. But sitting next to Dawn that day, whispering my answer to his, I don’t think we were disagreeing. I think we were describing the same man from two different rooms of the same house. You can’t get to Romans 12 without walking through Ephesians 2 first. Pete just happened to already be all the way through the door.
I’ll miss having someone who could hold both of those at once and never seem to notice he was doing it.
Celebration of Life for Pastor Pete Cropsey — September 19, 2026, Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa.
